Author

Paul Osterman

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This review was submitted by Mark.

(Sigh).

You'd think I'd be DESPERATE to read this book, and you'd be right.  Seriously. Which means I ended up angry even more that it was so poorly done, and SO poorly titled.

Imagine you're a researcher, and you think your book will deserve THAT title.  That's a big title, my friend.  You better earn it.

Then imagine that you say in the book that 'the purpose of this book is to understand what happened to middle managers as firms restructure.'

Okay, now wait.  Are you going to tell us the truth, or are you going to tell us what happened to them during a specific business process?

Further, imagine you're a researcher, and imagine you choose THAT title.  What do you think, maybe, interview, say... SIXTY MANAGERS?  FIFTY of whom were from only TWO firms, from the same industry, in the same town?  (Oh, and look at a bunch of census data, too.)

Are you kidding?  I didn't feel good writing a book about managing until I had interviewed THOUSANDS of managers.

When a researcher writes a book with the line, "Particularly striking was how the upward mobility process worked....the process seemed to designed to pick out winners and losers," you have to question how much this researcher really knows about organizations and the day to day lives of managers.

Seriously, how striking is it that promotion processes pick winners and losers?

Don't read this book unless you too will be struck by a promotion process that picks winners and losers.

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NickA's picture

I was really excited when I bought this book, and profoundly disappointed when I put it down after not learning anything useful from it.

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