"Succinctly but completely describing 50 of the most important management innovations in the past 150 years, Mol and Birkinshaw educate us on where and how managerial innovations arise. An amazing overview of the management practice landscape, Giant Steps in Management provides invaluable insights for organizations seeking better performance."

Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

"Never has it been more important for managers to innovate the way they manage. As this book so powerfully shows — management innovation — advances in how we manage — is a secret weapon in the search for competitive advantage. With a fantastic compendium of the 50 most crucial management innovations — this book will surprise, inform and inspire any manager who believes that they need to innovate the way they manage."

Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice, London Business School

Author of Hot Spots; why some teams, workplaces and organisations buzz with energy — and other’s don’t.

"This book might be called 'Everything you wanted to know about management, but were afraid to ask'. It's an invaluable quick guide to the entire arsenal of techniques and models, and I recommend it to anyone who takes the job of management seriously. It is typcial of the authors work, in that it is clear, crisp, and useful."
Tim Brooks, Managing Director, Guardian News & Media Limited

INNOVATION IS AT THE HEART OF GREAT MANAGEMENT

How do you manage?  What skills, ideas, tools and techniques do you use?  Have you always used them?  Think about it: how we manage organisations — and ourselves — is in a constant state of evolution.  Nothing about the way you work today is forever. Managers are always trying new things, different approaches.  There are management innovations underway all the time in large organisations. Many fail. Some work. A few make history. The most valuable ones are picked up and absorbed across entire industries and countries.  These are the ones this book will tell you about.

Giant Steps in Managementpresents a thought provoking selection of the 50 most important management innovations of the last 150 years and describes the impact they have on management today. Some of the innovations will be familiar to you; others will be new, different, surprising. Together, they form a fascinating compendium of the ideas, techniques and practices that have rocked the world of management.

If you want to be on the right side of innovation, keep this book to hand.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 1 Ratings

Great reference book, and particularly useful if you're looking at the history of innovations - 2008-10-20
Reviewer Rating:
I must confess that this book was a gift from a friend and when I read the back cover where Professor Lynda Gratton said that "....(it would) inpsire any manager who belives that they would need to innovate the way they manage", my expectations were naturally raised. I was expecting a book that not only documented how companies had innovated in the past, but probably some sort of thinking about what companies may have to consider in terms of innovating for the future.

Take the chapter on Internal Structure, where Mol and Birkinshaw discuss the evolution and tyranny of SBUs to the relatively more contemporary approaches taken by GE in the Welch area....all well and good, but in today's context where technology cycles are getting shorter, and consumer needs evolve more quickly, I was hoping that they would have at least attempted to see how companies like Google or Pixar outperformed rivals in their own industries, in terms of how they structured their teams/companies to outdo everyone in the innovation stakes. The marginal efforts to take this book there would have made a difference (or at least I thought so) in the way that it hoped to inspire managers to think about how they could innovate in their respective companies.

Make no mistake...this is a good reference book to have if you're a Management Book/Innovation afficionado or an MBA student doing a research paper on innovation. The various innovation management techniques have been very painstakingly researched and documented. You might be inspired to think about management innovation, but it did not quite wow me enough to make me want to go out and buy it for another friend. I'd have lent anyone my copy.,,,hence the 3 stars.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Business

Sub-Categories:
Business > Management Strategy