The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus.

A tip for the business traveler: Next you find yourself in an airport with an hour to kill, wander over the obligatory mini-bookstore on your concourse, home in on the management section, and play some games:

* Find two books whose theses, as expressed by their titles, neatly contradict one another. (The Customer Is Always Right! and The Customer Is Usually Wrong, say. Or The Team Handbook right next to No More Teams!)

* Find the most pathetic management book. (My favorite: The Supervisor's Script Book, which contains actual scripts to get a boss through sticky situations. A sampling: "Okay, Mary, thanks for leveling with me. I'm going to chat with Frieda and see how she feels about this" Provided that you have underlings named Mary and Frieda, this book is invaluable)

* Find the book with the dopiest title. (Jamming. Clicking. The Healing Manager: Or the surprisingly thick A Manager's Guide to Sexual Orientation in the Workplace.)

* Find the book that actually contains useful, sensible, surprising ideas for managing - ideas you would never have thought of yourself, but which will, once implemented, change your workplace for the better.

That last one's a trick question, by the way. Don't even try it.

How did all these dreadful books find their way to your local Barnes & Noble? Since when did telling bosses how to do their jobs become a career in and of itself? And how do you even begin to sift through the muck and actually find the few nuggets of value?

Well, you could start by consulting The Witch Doctors, an overlong but valuable overview of the management consulting profession by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. The authors, staff editors of The Economist, set forth a brief history of the science of management, explain the major issues facing management theorists, and offer a few guesses about management's future. Why should you care? Well, when Newt Gingrich is bragging about having read Peter Drucker and the major fact of corporate life is downsizing - a trend which began and was fed by the guru profession - it's probably best to sit up and take notice. And the uninitiated could do worse than this readable, blessedly jargon-free tour of the field.

The authors devote special attention to the two biggies: Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Drucker, they argue, is the one true great thinker that management theory has produced. As the authors put it, "Drucker has either invented or influenced virtually every part of management theory" - a bold statement, but probably accurate. Starting with his watershed 1946 work The Concept of the Corporation, Drucker set forth the principles upon which subsequent management theory has been built. The virtues of a decentralized corporate structure, the need for empowering individual workers, and the rise of the knowledge worker - all of which are taken for granted today - were set forth half a century ago by Drucker. Still, the authors get a little gushy about him, and while he deserves much of their praise, I'd have drawn the line at calling him an "undisputed alpha male."

If Drucker represents management theory at its most reasoned, erudite, and scientific, then Tom Peters represents the popular conception of a management guru. Author of the mega-selling In Search of Excellence, Peters is the charismatic guy who gives motivational lectures for big money and peppers his books and speeches with dopey catchphrases like "The Pursuit of Wow!" To their credit, Micklethwait and Wooldridge set Peters in his proper context, as the management thinker who gave business a much-needed wakeup call in the early '80s, criticizing the cherished corporate bureacracies of the time and challenging companies to reward innovation and risk-taking. What's more, Peters was the first business author to really engage his audience. It is easy to forget now, when management books regularly invoke the wisdom of Winnie-the-Pooh and Jean-Luc Picard, that business authors haven't always bothered to make their work interesting. Peters, on the other hand, didn't merely want to engage readers - he wanted, as he might say, to excite them! He wanted to thrill them!! He wanted to make them race yaks!!! His books (particularly the later ones) may get goony, but they're always accessible and inviting, making management sound as straightforward as car repair. And so the authors give Peters his due as the man who "has persuaded more managers to think a little bit more carefully about what they are doing than almost anyone else alive," even as they express their queasiness about what his success has bred: Hundreds of would-be Peterses who borrow his flashy style without its thoughtful underpinnings. In one all-too-brief chapter, the authors profile a few of the flakier characters, like Tony Robbins, who has clients walk across burning coals "protected by nothing other than the power of positive thinking."

It would be easy to dismiss these gurus as amusing snake oil salesmen, we're it not for the fact that so many corporate chiefs are taking them seriously - with sometimes devastating consequences. One of the best chapters traces the spread of the reengineering cult, from an article in the Harvard Business Review to a best-selling book (Reengineering the Corporation) to a stock-in-trade of consulting firms to a phenomenon that left hundreds of thousands jobless. Reengineering was a monster success - for the management industry. But for the companies who shed so many workers in painful restructurings, reengineering was, in many cases, a failure, with any gains in productivity or efficiency pretty much wiped out by ill will and time lost to water-cooler griping among the employees who remained. Nor has the management industry really been harmed by the pain it has caused. Instead, the authors note ominously, it has simply dusted itself off and gone on the prowl for "a new fad, a new idea that [can] be branded, preached, sold, and spread all around the world."

If reengineering isn't enough to make one pay attention to the gurus, then consider this: The client list of Tony Robbins - the coal-walking guy - happens to include our President, who is a huge fan of the management consultants. Indeed, the latest and most enthusiastic converts to guruspeak have been in the public sector. One of Al Gore's favorite books, Reinventing Government, was consciously modeled on Tom Peters's In Search of Excellence and originally had the clunky title, In Search of Excellence in Government. Politicians now hammer home their managerial acumen, despite the hard fact that management theory and politics fit together, in the authors' memorable phrase, "like trousers fit a chimpanzee - almost, but not quite" While many management principles can indeed be applied to government, they were designed for business. And no matter what Ross Perot may tell you, our government is not a business and cannot be run like one. The authors, in an excellent section on the flirtation between government and gurus, supply many examples of managerial techniques crashing and burning in the public sector, the most vivid of which is the failure of the Clinton health care plan. In the authors' eyes, the project was doomed from the start, as Ira Magaziner - who was, after all, head of a management consultancy - attempted to redesign America's health care system in much the same way that an automotive company would redesign a car: setting up committees of experts, assembling documents, and conducting meetings in strict secrecy. While this might work line in a business setting, where strong leadership and secrecy are weapons, in government, where compromise and openness (or, at least, the appearance of openness) are paramount, Magaziner's boardroom tactics failed spectacularly.

While those portions of the book dealing in specific personalities or issues are quite strong, it does have one glaring weakness: a long and mostly pointless middle section, ambitiously titled "The Great Debates" In this, the authors attempt to summarize all the major theoretical disputes in the management profession, then supply their own answers to these knotty problems. What makes the section infuriating is that the authors don't seem to know whether they want to present an objective account of the debates or if they want to take sides; thus, they offer compelling arguments for both positions, then, in the final pages of each chapter, announce their preference for one approach or the other (a preference which, coming without warning and with minimal explanation, seems arbitrary at best). Worse still, their preferences tend to occupy the murky middle ground of the debate, which makes one wonder why they bothered to take a stand at all.

For example, in their chapter on strategy, the authors present evidence both for and against the two most popular approaches to managing anorganization: creating a business plan and establishing a guiding vision. They then draw their own bold conclusion: "In the end, all strategy is gambling on the future. Visions - no less than plans - are only as good as those who make them" Um ... thanks. In chapters like this one, the authors come closer to reflecting, rather than transcending, the frustrating and self-contradictory nature of the management field.

The only one of the debates on which the authors take a provocative stand is the ongoing battle between "shareholder capitalism," which argues that companies' highest good is to produce short-term profits for Wall Street, and "stakeholder capitalism," which holds that companies' main concerns should be the long-term welfare of their workers and their business. The authors take the surprising view that shareholder capitalism is preferable, on the grounds that risky, fast-moving industries need the pressure that comes with shareholder money. What's more, they posit shareholders as the most efficient safeguard against the abuses of management. The major business scandals of recent years, they note, took place when there were no shareholders looking over the shoulders of a company's board. But while their point about the need for corporate oversight is true enough, the authors willfully omit the flip side: Shareholders can be just as greedy and rapacious as managers, and if recent history has taught us anything, it's that companies will do some stupid things to boost their share price in the short term. After all, the companies who announced downsizing plans to bump up their stock outperformed the market for six months afterward - but lagged behind three years later. The truth is that both approaches have their flaws, and as mealy-mouthed as the authors are on the other debates, this is one where I can't help but wish that they'd stuck to the middle ground.

But the weakness of this section does not negate the basic value of Micklethwait and Wooldridge's book: Overall, they've produced a readable primer on management which neatly boxes the compass of all the major theorists and their ideas. It may very well be the only management book of the past decade worth reading. No mean feat, that.