Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief article - Book review

Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence. By Philip Kotler and John A. Caslione. Amacom, 223 pages. $25.

The horrors of 2008 are thankfully behind us, but this is still a very timely book. The world economies are still turbulent, and given their interconnectivity, that's increasingly likely to continue.

Kotler and Caslione, business advisers and consultants who teach at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, posit that companies need to build early warning systems and quick-response scenarios to danger--a concept they attribute to Intel Corp.'s legendary CEO Andy Gove.

Of course, they note, the American business landscape is littered with the bones of those who had no such systems, often out of hubris.

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After building a case for an expectation of lasting turbulence, the authors take managements to task for wrong responses to bad times. It's a litany of classic mistakes, they write, most centered on ill-considered cost-cutting (often...