Other Sellers on Amazon
& FREE Shipping
100% positive over last 12 months
+ $3.99 shipping
96% positive over last 12 months
+ $3.99 shipping
92% positive over last 12 months

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.


Under New Management: How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual Hardcover – March 15, 2016
David Burkus (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
Price | New from | Used from |
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$7.00
| $7.95 with discounted Audible membership |
Preloaded Digital Audio Player, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
—
| — | — |
Enhance your purchase
Do open floor plans really work? Are there companies that put their employees’ welfare first, and their clients second? Are annual performance reviews necessary? Dr. David Burkus is a highly regarded and increasingly influential business school professor who challenges many of the established principles of business management. Drawing on decades of research, Burkus has found that not only are many of our fundamental management practices wrong and misguided, but they can be downright counterproductive. These days, the best companies are breaking the old rules. At some companies, e-mail is now restricted to certain hours, so that employees can work without distraction. Netflix no longer has a standard vacation policy of two to three weeks, but instructs employees to take time off when they feel they need it. And at Valve Software, there are no managers; the employees govern themselves. The revolutionary insights Burkus reveals here will convince companies to leave behind decades-old management practices and implement new ways to enhance productivity and morale.
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication dateMarch 15, 2016
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.91 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100544630971
- ISBN-13978-0544630970
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
- +
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
- Daniel H. Pink, bestselling author of DRIVE and TO SELL IS HUMAN
"I can't stop raving about Under New Management to friends and colleagues. If you are going to read one book on being a better manager in the next year, start here. David Burkus has assembled the most practical research and provocative ideas into an incredibly quick read.” - Tom Rath, bestselling author of STRENGTHS FINDER 2.0
"In Under New Management, Burkus hauls 20th-century management ideas to the scrap heap while revealing counterintuitive practices that will drive organizational performance in the back half of the 21st century. And like any good manager, he under-promises, and over-delivers. Under New Management is a lively, provocative, must read."
–Whitney Johnson, Thinkers50, World's Most Influential Management Thinkers, author of DISRUPT YOURSELF: PUTTING THE POWER OF DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION TO WORK.
“David Burkus challenges established management principles and reveals the counterintuitive practices that really drive organizational performance. Under New Management makes a provocative case that you should put customers second, close open offices, and ditch performance appraisals.”
-Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Times bestselling author of GIVE AND TAKE and ORIGINALS
Under New Management dares us to rethink some of our most closely held assumptions about management – should we fire managers? Pay people to quit? Celebrate departures? Burkus masterfully questions so-called "best practices” and illustrates how today’s leading companies are unleashing human talent. If you want to stay ahead in the new game of work, read this book!
-Liz Wiseman, bestselling author of MULTIPLIERS and ROOKIE SMARTS
On Seinfeld, perpetual screw-up George Constanza eventually realized that since every impulse he had turned out to be wrong, if he simply did the opposite he would succeed. In David Burkus' brilliant follow-up to the Myths of Creativity, he proves (with data!) just how well that same bit of logic applies to modern management. Get rid of your email, open offices, and performance reviews. Let people take vacation whenever they want, and pay them to quit. If what you’re doing isn’t working, Burkus will show you what does.
-Heidi Grant Halvorson, bestselling author of NO ONE UNDERSTANDS YOU AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
From the Inside Flap
Should employees know each others salaries?
Do open floor plans really work? Or is it all just about saving money?
Are there companies that truly put their employees welfare first . . . and their clients second?
Are annual performance reviews really necessary?
In Under New Management, Dr. David Burkus, a highly regarded and increasingly influential business school professor, challenges many of the established principles of everyday business practices. Drawing upon the latest research in the field, Burkus has found that not only are many of our fundamental management practices wrong and misguided, but even worse, they can be downright counterproductive.
These days, the best companies are breaking the old and tired rules. For example, in some firms, e-mail is now restricted to only certain hours, so that employees can work without distraction. Netflix no longer has a standard vacation policy of two to three weeks, but instructs employees to take time off when they feel they need it. And at Valve Software, there are no managers; the employees govern themselves. And this is just the beginning.
The revolutionary insights Burkus reveals here will convince companies to leave behind decades-old stale management approaches and to implement new ways that will thoroughly enhance employee productivity and morale.
From the Back Cover
Is your company ready for a radical departure from twentieth-century management standards and a bold new approach? In Under New Management, David Burkus has collected the stories of dozens of companies that are making this journey. Theyre standing the old rules on their heads and running their businesses with refreshing amounts of transparency and autonomy. Even better, Burkus shows how you can do it too. Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and To Sell Is Human
I cant stop raving about Under New Management to friends and colleagues. If you are going to read one book on being a better manager in the next year, start here. David Burkus has assembled the most practical research and provocative ideas into an incredibly quick read. Tom Rath, best-selling author of StrengthsFinder 2.0
In Under New Management, Burkus hauls twentieth-century management ideas to the scrap heap while revealing counterintuitive practices that will drive organizational performance in the back half of the twenty-first century. And like any good manager, he under-promises and over-delivers. Under New Management is a lively, provocative must-read. Whitney Johnson, Thinkers50, Worlds Most Influential Management Thinkers, and author of Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work
David Burkus challenges established management principles and reveals the counterintuitive practices that really drive organizational performance. Under New Management makes a provocative case that you should put customers second, close open offices, and ditch performance appraisals. Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Times best-selling author of Give and Take and Originals
About the Author
Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Product details
- Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (March 15, 2016)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0544630971
- ISBN-13 : 978-0544630970
- Item Weight : 12.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.91 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,576,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,255 in Workplace Culture (Books)
- #15,187 in Business Management (Books)
- #16,987 in Leadership & Motivation
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David Burkus’ forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are helping leaders and teams do their best work ever.
He is the best-selling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USAToday, Fast Company, the Financial Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS This Morning. Since 2017, Burkus has been ranked as one of the world’s top business thought leaders by Thinkers50. As a sought-after international speaker, his TED Talk has been viewed over 2 million times. He’s worked with leaders from organizations across all industries including Google, Stryker, Fidelity, Viacom, and even the US Naval Academy.
A former business school professor, Burkus holds a master’s degree in organizational psychology from the University of Oklahoma, and a doctorate in strategic leadership from Regent University.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2016
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
1. Outlaw Email
2. Put Customers Second
3. Lose the Standard Vacation Policy
4. Pay People to Quit
5. Make Salaries Transparent
6. Ban Noncompetes
7. Ditch Performance Appraisals
8. Hire as a Team
9. Write the Org Chart in Pencil
10. Close Open Offices
11. Take Sabbaticals
12. Fire the Managers
13. Celebrate Departures.
Some of these sound counterintuitive at first glance, but he makes the case, with examples of companies that have tried them, that they can actually work. Some of this is not new. For example, the idea of scrapping the standard vacation policy was explored in Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. They argued, as does David Burkus, that as long as the work is done accurately and on time, it shouldn't matter if you're at your desk for a certain time each day. There is some freshness to this book, though, from the use of real world examples. Some of them are modified from what he thinks. For example, the chapter on outlaw e-mail could be retitled outlaw internal e-mail. If a client is emailing you something important, you'd better be ready to take it. Space alone prohibits me from going into detail about every chapter.
One thing I wish the book had done more of is to show instances where the item in the chapter title was tried, and it didn't work. There is some of this, but there could be more. In the chapter on salaries, he discusses a company called SumAll, which has fixed, but transparent, salaries. You're assigned to a salary level, and there is apparently no negotiation. When I saw that, I thought of Ellen Pao, former CEO at Reddit. Ms Pao came to Reddit after losing a discrimination suit against her former employer, an investment firm. The jury returned the verdict in favor of the firm. Ms Pao then instituted a no negotiation policy for salaries at Reddit. This was your salary, take it or leave it. It was supposed to take the pressure off people who didn't feel comfortable negotiating, which some studies have shown many women are. Ms Pao may still have been reeling from her loss in court. At any rate, the policy was universally panned, not just at Reddit, but on other social media and the regular media. It probably led to her exit from Reddit. I believe the policy has since been rescinded. I'm not sure if salaries at Reddit were disclosed within the company or not. This would have been a good example for the book.
The author does emphasize flexibility. There is no one size fits all solution. For example, I'm a CPA who does taxes. The policy on vacations would have to be modified. January 1-April 15, no extended vacations other than medical or death in the family. The rest of the year, the schedule is much more flexible. That's what I like about this book. It doesn't attempt to impose a solution. it suggests a solution, and leaves it to the individual companies to implement it, realizing that it may not work for everyone. All in all, a good book.
The book starts with a short history of Fredrick Taylor's promotion of "scientific management" and the significant impact it had on business in the 20th century before noting that "[it] became obvious as early as the 1950s that the tools of “Taylorism” weren’t going to work in the new world of work." The author then challenges readers to consider if it might be time to reexamine the management fundamentals in general practice today, and proceeds to dive into ideas around "new management."
The "radical" new management ideas covered in the book include:
* Outlaw Email
* Put Customers Second
* Lose the Standard Vacation Policy
* Pay People to Quit
* Make Salaries Transparent
* Ban Noncompetes
* Ditch Performance Appraisals
* Hire as a Team
* Write the Org Chart in Pencil
* Close the Open Offices
* Take Sabbaticals
* Fire the Managers
* Celebrate Departures
As a fan of the author's previous book, The Myths of Creativity, I was eager to read this and it met and exceeded all of my expectations.
For each of the ideas covered in the book, the author starts with an example from a company currently employing the idea in practice, such as Netflix's "famous" unlimited vacation policy or Zappo's quitting bonus. These examples drill into the reasons these companies have adopted these ideas in the first place, as well as the specific ways in which they're implementing them. The chapters that explore these ideas also note that there are challenges associated with implementing them. For instance, the idea of unlimited vacation is one that many managers would balk at, simply due to concerns of employee abuse. Many of the chapters address these concerns, citing how managers and leaders in the example companies deal with the challenges inherent in adopting these new approaches. Many of the companies adopting these ideas are quite well known (such as Netflix, Zappos, or Virgin Group) while others are less well known, but one thing these example companies all have in common is that they have seen real, tangible benefits from adopting these "radical" new ideas.
At first glance, it might be easy to write off many of the ideas in this book as flukes that can work only in specific cases at specific companies. However, the book doesn't stop with simple anecdotes. In addition to anecdotes and examples, the author also cites research in the social sciences related to the ideas in this book. For example, in the chapter about Netflix's unlimited vacation policy ("Lose the Standard Vacation Policy") the author spends considerable time looking at the idea of trust (a "word commonly used by leaders who advocate vacation nonpolicies") and its relationship to decision making and studies in neuroeconomics, "an emerging field that studies human decision-making through the lens of traditional economics but also through the scientific study of the brain." This inclusion of related research makes the ideas in this book even more compelling. Beyond the anecdotes of how these ideas have been implemented, the related research provides insight into why these ideas work, and how they can work in other organizations.
I think companies and organizations should consider all of the ideas in this book, but of the ideas presented in this book, I especially liked “Put Customers Second,” “Ditch Performance Appraisals,” and “Take Sabbaticals.” I like these ideas because they are particularly focused on employee welfare and satisfaction. Employees are among a company’s most important stakeholders and I believe it’s vital for companies to nurture and support the people who make their businesses successful.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in management and business looking for new ideas for moving their companies and organizations into the 21st century and beyond.
[Disclaimer: I received a complimentary electronic copy of this book for being part of the book's "Launch Team".]
Under New Management is a must read for those starting companies and re-thinking the way things have always been done. Let's hope this book catches on like wildfire!
For instance, eliminating the annual employee review is an idea that should be implemented immediately. The "open office" concept is a train wreck. But what would you think about paying people to quit? Or outlawing email? Or making salaries transparent (YEOW!)? Burkus puts 13 ideas into the book that have made their way into parts of the corporate universe; you'll enjoy reading them because most are probably ideas you haven't considered.
Grab a copy; I highly recommend that you do. If nothing else, you need to know what's happening out there, but I suspect that you will enjoy the easy-reading style AND the information the book contains.
Top reviews from other countries

the book is well organized and an easy and enjoyable read with stories from many diverse workplace cultures. It is worth the read!

