Browse

The book reviews the career of Lyndall Urwick, the dominant figure in British management between the late 1920s and the early 1960s, both in terms of his writings and his passion in pursuit of management as a scientific and systematic activity rather than the rule‐of‐thumb approach to decision‐making all too prevalent in Britain. He was greatly influenced by his experiences in the First World War and at Rowntree's, before becoming Director of the International Management Institute (IMI) between 1928–33 and then forming a very influential management consultancy, Urwick Orr and Partners (UOP), which he chaired for the rest of his career. He was also deeply involved with almost all the institutional developments in British management up to the 1960s, including the Management Research Groups (MRGs), the Institute of Industrial Administration (IIA), the British Institute of Management (BIM), the Administrative Staff College (ASC), and the management education side of the Anglo‐American Council on Productivity (AACP). In pursuit of what he called his ‘mission at large’, he gave hundreds of talks in his lucid and charismatic style, many of which were published as articles or booklets. These talks were not only in Britain but in Australia as well after his emigration there in 1961, in America, where he became the best‐recognized foreign exponent of management, and in a range of countries around the world. But he will probably be best remembered for his writings, not only on organization theory, where he is recognized as a great synthesizer and leader in the classical school, but also on a wide range of other topics, including the history of management, leadership, marketing, and management education and development. Truly he was a man of many parts.

Edith Penrose was a creative thinker, a distinguished economist, and an inspirational teacher who profoundly challenged the prevailing orthodoxy in several fields, including micro-economics, business studies, and development economics. Her major contribution to the field of economics was The Theory of the Growth of the Firm (1959), now regarded as a classic that has ‘inspired thinking in strategy, entrepreneurship, knowledge creation, and innovation’. Edith Penrose’s approach to explaining the nature of the firm, her fundamental insights, and the concepts she developed are still being applied and extended to new fields of enquiry. She has had a major influence on the study of the business enterprise and, some argue, the economy itself. She had a distinguished academic and public service career and wrote over 100 books and articles, many of which are devoted to the understanding of the interface between the strategies and activities of multinational enterprises, including the oil industry, and the nation states—particularly the developing countries—in which they operated. This is the first biography of Edith Penrose drawing on unpublished diaries and letters, the personal memories of her family, friends, and colleagues, and describes her eventful life, her extensive output, and influence. The book tells her personal and professional story, weaving through the extraordinary upheavals of the twentieth century in which she played a part. The book builds a picture of a vital, energetic woman who lived life to the full, defied convention, made an impression on all who met her, and left a significant intellectual legacy.

In less than three decades, Nokia emerged from Finland to lead the mobile phone revolution. It grew to have one of the most recognizable and valuable brands in the world and then fell into decline, leading to the sale of its mobile phone business to Microsoft. This book explores and analyzes that journey and distills observations and lessons for anyone keen to understand what drove Nokia’s amazing success and sudden downfall. It is tempting to lay the blame for Nokia’s demise at the doors of Apple, Google, and Samsung, but this would be to ignore one very important fact: Nokia had begun to collapse from within well before any of these companies entered the mobile communications market, and this makes Nokia’s story all the more interesting. Observing from the position of privileged outsiders (with access to Nokia’s senior managers over the last twenty years and a more recent, concerted research agenda), this book describes and analyzes the various stages in Nokia’s journey. This is an inside story: one of leaders making strategic and organizational decisions, of their behavior and interactions, and of how they succeeded and failed to inspire and engage their employees. Perhaps most intriguingly, it is a story that opens the proverbial “black box” of why and how things actually happen at the top of organizations. Why did things fall apart? To what extent were avoidable mistakes made? Did the world around Nokia change too fast for it to adapt? Did Nokia’s success contain the seeds of its failure?