Douglas McGregor, Revisited: Managing the Human Side of the Enterprise

Now that we've been downsized and outsourced and reengineered and networked, management gurus are finally focusing on the one universal resource that has been staring them in the face all along: their so-called "human capital." The funny thing is, some of the best thinking on the subject was published more than four decades ago, when few senior business people were ready to listen. In essays like "New Concepts of Management" and books like The Human Side of Enterprise, the late MIT educator Douglas McGregor argued articulately that corporations are not merely machines, nor are workers simply cogs to run them. Now, in Douglas McGregor, Revisited, Gary Heil, Warren G. Bennis, and Deborah C. Stephens resurrect many of these prescient observations and place them in a context appropriate for our times. The three prominent leadership specialists open with "Why McGregor Matters," an extensive section in which his opinions are discussed as they relate to performance, cooperation, motivation, commitment, and other topics like teams. The authors conclude with selections from McGregor's work that address issues (including the changing composition of the industrial work force, job satisfaction, and paternalism) that remain as relevant today as the day they were written. --Howard Rothman