The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus.

• Author: Carvell, Tim

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" -...