Management Stripped Bare: What They Don't Teach You at Business School [Paperback]

Praise and Reviews

`A brave and entertaining assault on the sacred cows of management... get ready for a provocative and entertaining look at how poorly we run our businesses and how to manage them better.`

PHILIP KOTLER, Professor of Marketing at Kellogg Graduate School of Management and Author of Marketing Management

`At once entertaining and insightful, Jo Owen`s book provides a much-needed reality check for embattled managers the world over. At a time when so much theorizing has been found wanting, it is refreshing to find an almost complete absence of magic formulae and instant solutions and in their stead plenty of clearly expressed common sense.`

ROGER TRAPP, Management Journalist and Author

`Jo Owen presents many insights into the reality of business life and success. We may not agree with all he says, but he certainly makes us think. His writing is refreshing.`

JAMES KELLY

"Witty and punchy."

This book is about business as it is - not as it should be.

Managers face the same problems the world over. They are confronted with a host of horrors - bad meetings, boring presentations, difficult bosses, political intrigue, insufficient staff, unreasonable goals, inadequate resources and constant change - and somehow they are meant to make sense of it all. But they don't teach you how to do this in business school. Business schools provide a core of business knowledge, but not skills.

In the real world managers learn from experience. They learn from the successes and failures of others - as well as their own. And most managers construct a model of how they think their world works and how they can survive it.

This is where Management Stripped Bare comes in. Jo Owen has produced an essential tool for managers based on 20 years of working with some of the best, and worst, businesses in the world. He has mapped out which approaches consistently work, and which do not.

Punchy, edgy and refreshingly honest, Jo Owen's guide deals with over 150 universal management challenges. Each challenge is described, and successful and unsuccessful responses are illustrated with real case examples.

Short on theory and long on experience, this is a book that you must read to ensure your corporate survival.

Irreverent and incisive, Management Stripped Bare cuts through the usual management hype and rhetoric to reveal what business is really all about.

Forget what you have learnt or might learn at business school - this is the stark reality!

Daily Express

'He takes the reader through the very material that they not only don't teach you at business school but can't teach you - common sense borne out of experience.'

TrainingZONE

This book is about management as it is. It looks at all the nasty, messy reality of boring memos, e-mails and presentations; unreasonable goals and inadequate resources; politics ambiguity and change. It then looks at what, practically, management can do about it.

The answers are not drawn from some grand theory. The answers are all drawn from real life, from watching other managers get it brilliantly right or catastrophically wrong. After twnety years of living in Japan, Europe and America and working in chemicals, banking, foods, telecoms, computing and more even I began to notice that there were consistent patterns of success and failure. This book is a record of those successes and failures, and how we can learn form them.

This is not a book for you if you lack a sense of humour, if you think that business should be dull and worthy. It is not a book for you if you want one big simple answer to the meaning of everything. But if you want a practical book you will enjoy and, I hope, learn from then this could be the book for you.

Many thanks to all those of have already reviewed the book: I greatly appreciate your comments. If you have any other comments, please drop me an e-mail at jo.owen@virgin.net.

There is no single rule of success and this is not a grand theory of management. There is an infinite number of ways to succeed and fail, and this book is conduit to getting it right.

Jo Owen

Jo Owen is CEO of Auvian Partners, and has spent 20 years working for some of the best companies in the world. These include Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), Apple Computers, Cap Gemini, BT, Barclays Bank, Halifax and Merrill Lynch. He has lived in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and Japan, and has worked with some of the world`s leading business school professors. His experience crosses industries and continents; it has required working in many different environments - from the boardroom to the post room - and forms the basis for this enlightening book.