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I am currently reading a revelation book titled "Back to Basic Management-The Lost Craft of Leadership". A book written by three authors, each of whom has had extensive experience in and with management. They bring with them the notion that people are the "X factor" in a business, not the "bottom line". Business is about people management, not just targets and projections, profit and loss. I would like to quote some excerpts of the introduction and first chapter.

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What we are concerned with is the phenomenon known as the "MBA mentality." This, in our opinion, is a wonderfully simplistic way of looking at the complexities of modern business. Planning is important; organization is important; goal-directed behavior is important; bottom-line awareness is important. But these are only the beginning, because all the numbers and rules are subject to change when you run up against the great variable-people.


Coupled with the growing dependence on"planners" rather than "doers" is the enormous change resulting from the rapid rush into computerization. Here too the emphasis has been on facts and figures which seem to represent a higher truth because they come out of a complicated and expensive electronic brain. How soon we forget the first law of computerization: Garbage in, garbage out.

Since both computers and the "MBA mentality" are largely the province of the young, they have lead to still another problem-a developing generation gap in business and industry. In times of crisis and recession, the essential weaknesses of process-oriented managers and inexperienced MBAs were illuminated. When sales declined and costs skyrocketed, profits and stock prices went down and down. It was then that the CEOs turned to their pragmatic, experienced, people-oriented managers to solve their problems. It was back-to-basics management in full flower.
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During the past two decades three ordinary letters have been transformed into a magical spell that, like "open sesame," can open the heaviest doors without effort. An MBA has become the key to the executive suite.

Many people assume that an MBA is a certified expert in management. Yet, even the words behind the magic letters do not imply this. Business administration sounds mundane and is a rather static concept. On the other hand, while management sounds fairly mundane, business has long regarded it as a dynamic concept. An administrator presides over a business; a manager leads it.

A principal theme of this book is that this seemingly semantic difference is of enormous significance to the future of business. We have filled the top echelons of our corporations with administrators who preside over the entities they ought to lead. By an overemphasis on process and techniques, we have lost the craft of leadership.
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This is not to say, of course, that the holder of an MBA cannot be a manager-leader. Theoretically, the percentage of potential manager-leaders among MBAs should be similar to the percentage among businessmen and women with an equal number of years of business experience. In reality, MBAs as a group probably produce fewer manager-leaders because they have to overcome their initial misconception that a business consists of numbers rather than people
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