What Management Is How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business

A beginner's guide and a bible for one of the greatest social innovations of modern times: the discipline of management. What Management Isdistills the wisdom of a sea of analysis and research into one simple, clear volume, explaining both the logic of successful organizations and how that logic is embodied in practice. Making rich use of contemporary and historical examples, Joan Magretta brings to life management's High Concepts: value creation, business models, competitive strategy, and organizational design. She devotes equal attention to the often unwritten rules of execution that characterize the best-performing organizations. Throughout, she shows how the principles of management that work in for-profit businesses canand mustbe applied to nonprofits as well. This is the big-picture management book for our times, defining a common standard of managerial literacy that will help all of us lead more productive lives, whether we aspire to be managers or not.

Joan Magretta, M.B.A., Ph.D., is an award-winning contributor to the Harvard Business Review, where she was the strategy editor during the 1990s. Before that she was a partner at Bain & Company, a leading management consulting firm.