SUPERMANAGING: How to Harness Change for Personal and Organizational Success

A couple of management consultants have monitored ""fifty carefully selected periodicals"" (plus conferences, TV, etc.) ""in search of developments that will affect our future""--which they now serve up to managers in 30 brief, scrappy chapters. Unlike Megatrends--a by-product, you may recall, of corporate-consultant Naisbitt's monitoring of newspapers--there is little synthesis and no particular vision. Nor, for the regular reader of (say) Newsweek and Business Week, is there anything new in these spot reports on vogue topics--like communications technology and the two-wage-earner household, the financial services sector and the independent world economy. True, the topics are organized in ways meant to be meaningful--the two-wage-earner household, for instance, comes under ""Who Are the New Employees?""--and they sometimes do give rise to a pertinent observation or two: men with working wives are more economically independent (""The need for that next promotion. . . becomes greatly diminished""); flexible hours are a good idea for both working parents. Also, the authors' lists of specific indicators are usually quite valid--at least in business-management areas, from job satisfaction to corporate governance. (As regards environmentalism, technology, the US or world economy, this is wispy.) And from their '82-'83 reading, Brown and Weiner know, for example, that ""the work ethic is alive and well"": Daniel Yankelovich said so, in the May 1982 Psychology Today. A managerial type who's been hibernating could get the current drift of all sorts of things here--without, however, a full grasp of any.