Mad, Sad and Bad Management

This entertaining and instructive book contains some five dozen analyses on aspects of modern business and management, working through the alphabet from appraisal apologetics and business travel to voluntary severance and work-family interface. The book starts with an aperitif and ends with a substantial digestif. The theme is incompetence rather than competence, stupidity rather than wisdom and insanity rather than sanity. Overall, Adrian Furnham takes an enthusiastic, more than a cynical, look at management practices, managers and management science. His inspiration started with the serious literature on management, which he finds somewhat dull - who can argue? - moved onto the guru-inspired, magic-formula texts and was finally spiced up by real-life accounts of failures and cock-ups to be found in the popular press and in his own consultancy.