Julian Birkinshaw 
Reinventing Management 
Smarter Choices for Getting Work Done, Revised and Updated Edition

The economic crisis was not just caused by a failure of
regulation or economic policy; it was a story of the failure of
management in a fundamental sense–a deeply flawed
approach to management that encouraged bankers to pursue
opportunities without regard for their long-term consequences, and
to put their own interests ahead of those of their employers and
their shareholders.



The revised edition of this best-selling book shows convincingly
that many of today’s major economic problems in the west can
be traced to a failure of management. In this updated edition
the author draws our attention to new examples of failed
management, from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and the disaster
at BP, to the ongoing problems in financial services companies such
as UBS and RBS. Throughout the book the references and
statistics have been updated, to make this a current, highly
relevant analysis of the problems besetting modern business and how
managers need to tackle them.

Table of Content

Preface ix

Acknowledgements xiii

About the Author xvii

Chapter 1 Why Management Failed 1

Chapter 2 What’s Your Management Model? 27

Chapter 3 Coordinating Activities: From Bureaucracy to Emergence
53

Chapter 4 Making and Communicating Decisions: From Hierarchy to
Collective Wisdom 85

Chapter 5 Setting Objectives: From Alignment to Obliquity
119

Chapter 6 Motivating Employees: From Extrinsic to Intrinsic
Motivation 145

Chapter 7 Four Models of Management 173

Chapter 8 The Change Agent’s Agenda 205

Chapter 9 The Leader’s Agenda 225

Epilogue Broadening the Debate on Reinventing Management 251

Notes 263

Index 283

About the author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julian Birkinshaw is Professor and Chair of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School. He has Ph D and MBA degrees in Business from the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Durham. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Stockholm School of Economics, 2009.

Professor Birkinshaw’s main area of expertise is in the strategy and management of large multinational corporations, and on such specific issues as corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, subsidiary-headquarters relationship, knowledge management, network organizations, and global customer management. He is the author of ten other books, including Giant Steps in Management (2007), Inventuring: Why Big Companies Must Think Small (2003), Leadership the Sven-Goran Eriksson Way (2002) and Entrepreneurship in the Global Firm (2001), and over seventy articles in such journals as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Strategy Management Journal and Academy of Management Journal. He is active as a consultant and executive educator to many large companies, including Rio Tinto, SAP, GSK, ABB, Ericsson, Kone, Petrofac, WPP, Bombardier, Sara Lee, HSBC, Akzo Nobel, Roche, Thyssen Krupp, UBS, PWC, Coloplast, BBC, Unilever and Novo Nordisk.

In 1998 the leading British Management magazine Management Today profiled Professor Birkinshaw as one of six of the ‘Next Generation of Management Gurus’. He is regularly quoted in international media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and The Times. He speaks regularly at business conferences in the UK, Europe, North America and Australia.

Professor Birkinshaw is co-founder with best-selling author Gary Hamel of the Management Innovation Lab (MLab), a unique partnership between academia and business that is seeking to accelerate the evolution of management.