Book Audits

By Janice Castro

MISMANAGERS

The decline in America's smoke stack industries is sparking a boom in books proposing cures. Industrial Renaissance (Basic Books; 194 pages; $19) places the blame for America's ills squarely at management's door. According to William Abernathy and Kim Clark, two Harvard business school professors, and Alan Kantrow, a Harvard Business Review editor, the problems are not due to a sluggish economy, overpriced labor or predatory competition from abroad, but to managers who "view their work through a haze of outdated assumptions and expectations." The book is an expanded version of a controversial 1980 article by Abernathy that was published in the Harvard Business Review under the title "Managing Our Way to Economic Decline."

Given their rather harsh diagnosis, the authors' conclusions are surprisingly optimistic. They cite several American companies, including General Electric, Cummins Engine and Signetics Corp., a semiconductor firm, for some promising management innovations. General Electric, for example, involves shop-floor workers in finding ways to improve production.Such cases leave the authors upbeat about the long-term outlook for American business.

PAVLOV IN THE OFFICE

Since its publication last September, The One Minute Manager (Morrow; 111 pages; $15) has sold more than half a million copies. This week it is No. 3 on the New York Times bestseller list. The thin volume by Management Consultant Kenneth Blanchard and Psychologist Spencer Johnson sets forth the three secrets that they claim can transform executives into models of efficiency and their employees into grinning self-starters. The formulas for success: One Minute Goals, One Minute Praisings and One Minute Reprimands.

The rules are deceptively simple. The boss is instructed to express his demands succinctly, in One Minute Goals. As soon as he can "catch the employee doing something right," he administers Part 2, One Minute Praising: he says something good fast. The authors advise the boss to put an arm around the employee or touch the person in some other way to convey personal affection. During a One Minute Reprimand, the manager is supposed to explain how hurt and frustrated he is by the employee's poor performance.

This book is little more than an executive-suite version of the conditionedreflex theory pioneered by Russian Physiologist Ivan Pavlov. While such tactics seem to work well on dogs, pigeons and rats, they might not succeed in the office. The first time a boss puts his arm around an employee he is trying to praise, he might find himself on the receiving end of a One Second Reprimand: a punch in the nose.

UNDER SCRUTINY

Ever since the widespread social protests of the '60s gave way to the economic shocks of the '70s and '80s, pollsters and academics have noted declining American confidence in the nation's institutions. In The Confidence Gap (Free Press; 434 pages; $19.95), Stanford Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute attempt to discover how steep that decline has been and what caused it.

While Americans are always some what skeptical of the motives of anyone in power, the events of the past 20 years, especially the economic woes of the past decade, have sharpened that instinct. Thus as inflation and unemployment rose to historic highs, barometers of public trust in the performance of institutions were falling to record lows. The authors ask: Is the much touted crisis of confidence in U.S. institutions really a perceived crisis of competence in those in charge? Is it simply democracy at work?

The authors point out that polls were finding discontent during a time of both disappointments and gains. The same period that saw riots, Watergate and news of high-level corruption in business was marked by advances in civil rights and environmental legislation and the rise of women in the ranks of management. As a result, business leaders may be trusted less than they were during the Eisenhower era because the public demands more from them in terms of social responsibility. What businessmen often perceive as public antagonism may be only the unwavering scrutiny of better-informed citizens and consumers.

-- By Janice Castro This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.