Management from the Masters

Subtitled “from Confucius to Warren Buffett”, this book forms a compendium of key management thinking through the years. Witzel is a Fellow at the University of Exeter Business School and is a prolific writer on business.

Each of the book's 20 chapters takes us through one well-established law or rule of business. Some are ancient and have been tested through time, falling into the broad heading of "Rules of the Universe"; other more recent ones fall into the category of "Rules of the Organisation". These include the Law of Entrophy, Moore's Law, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Parkinson's Law, the Peter Principle, the Pareto Principle, Fayol's 14 Points and Drucker's Rule. As well as describing each law and its evolution and practice, it also looks at the consequences for organisations that have broken them.

The book is a reminder about what is important in management and is designed to get people back to basics. The message here is that notions of paradigm shifts and that “it is different this time” were responsible for the disaster of the dotcom era and the financial crash of 2008, and we need to get back to basic principles.