THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ON MANAGEMENT: The Best of the ""Manager's Journal

A collection of short-take columns from The Wall Street Journal, which ranks among the season's more useful--and inviting--management guides. All told, the text has 60 mostly ad-rem pieces in seven broad categories ranging from strategic planning and personnel policy through advanced technology. The contributors are a varied lot, encompassing not only a flock of consultants but also corporate heavyweights like Donald Burr (who extols the absence of bureaucracy at People Express), Intel's Andrew Grove (a fan of meetings as well as rigorous employee evaluations), and Hewlett-Packard CEO John Young (an apostle of quality control). Specialists offer commonsense counsel on such workaday subjects as office romances, alcoholism, what's involved in hiring teenagers for the summer, and retaining retired executives for substantive assignments. Much of the material is aimed at individuals yet to reach the organizational peak; among the topics covered are critiquing superiors, reacting productively to dismissal, and dealing with recruiters. There are signs of the times as well, including advisories on creating crisis-management teams to cope with acts of terrorism, the drawbacks of anti-takeover measures (by, of all people, Sir James Goldsmith), the many little ways in which a husband can help his executive wife keep her juggling act together, exploiting new technology (mainly by determining when it's time to scrap the old), and the limits of Japanese quality circles. There is also the odd delight: Peter Baida of Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, for example, reviews Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener to reach the unexceptionable conclusion that malcontents should not be coddled. For managers at all levels, then, a superior source of briefings in which management theory takes a back seat to practice