Your Management Sucks: No, This Book Does

Looking for a manager to emulate? How about Donald Rumsfeld?

Your Management Sucks: Why You Have to Declare War on Yourself … and Your Business. By Mark Stevens. Crown Business, 302 pp., $25.

By Janice Harayda

Business books are among the cesspools of the publishing industry. For every Liar’s Poker or Barbarians at the Gate, there are countless volumes that take sewerage disposal to new depths.

The latest deposit in the cesspool comes from Mark Stevens, the CEO of a “global marketing firm” and author of the earlier – what, you haven’t heard of it? – Your Marketing Sucks. Stevens argues that managers must “declare war” on themselves and their companies to survive in a cutthroat marketplace. And early on he gives an example of a leader who embodies his philosophy — the chief architect of the war that has killed nearly 3,000 members of the U.S. military in Iraq. As secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld shook up the Pentagon, so that “cliques of generals learned the hard way (for Rumsfeld and for them, because these conflicts are always bloody) that the secretary was driving through their barricades.”

The tin ear Stevens shows here – for language and human suffering – doesn’t go away in chapters on developing your “killer app” and unleashing “your Manhattan Project.” He assaults you with so many clichés, you begin to think that the Guinness world-records people should add a category for him. One stupefying passage deals with what happens when companies focus on small goals instead of big ones:

“I think of it as the shooting-fish-in-barrel syndrome … When a business grows beyond initial projections, once it appears to defy gravity and build a powerful momentum, managers can become intoxicated by this magic-carpet ride and believe that from that moment on the future is golden. Guaranteed. A sure thing. And that’s when they put the plane on autopilot and a hard landing looms in the not-so-distant future.”

Stevens believes that “weak managers” tell people they can spend time “with their kids every night.” But research has shown that employees in their 20s and 30s care far more about such issues than their parents did, and options such as flextime help to retain high performers. If Stevens is aware of the studies, he gives no indication of it, and such omissions make his book read a times as though it emerged from a time capsule buried in the heyday of some of the people he holds up as models – Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Lee Iacocca, Carl Icahn, Estée Lauder, George Patton, and Harry Truman. Your Management Sucks might be a battle cry, but it’s a call to the kind of war that Donald Rumsfeld scripted, and is becoming more unpopular every day.

Best Line: “When I say, ‘Your management sucks,’ I’m talking to myself as well.” You said it, not me.

Worst Line (Tie): Winner No. 1: “Forget the horse that looks like a camel because the committee created it. We’ve heard that too many times.” Then why is it in this book? Winner No. 2: “To hell with what clients expect to hear. To tell with what they want to hear. Shock them with intelligence! With epiphanies! With the element of surprise!” Better still, shock them by saying something that makes sense! Instead of inanities like, “Shock them … with the element of surprise!”

Published: May 2006

© 2006 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.