I’m a sucker for management books. I read a lot of them—a habit I picked up in business school—and over the course of time I’ve developed a pretty good eye for what is truly great management thinking, as well as what is just run-of-the-mill management chatter. 

So my expectations jumped off the chart when I got a new book The Management Gurus—Lessons From the Best Management Books of All Time. Touting lessons from “the best management books of all time” sets the bar pretty high, of course, and I was expecting excerpts from the classics, perhaps The Practice of Management by the late, great Peter Drucker, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance by Michael Porter, Good to Great by Jim Collins, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Collins and his partner Jerry Porras, or maybe even something more current, like Bob Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t or Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Now that would have made for a great book.

Unfortunately, that’s not what you get in The Management Gurus—Lessons From the Best Management Books of All Time. Chalk it up to the lack of truth in advertising here. While there are some decent lessons from a few solid management thinkers, there is nothing that rises to the level of Drucker, or Collins, or Porter, or even the writing of Jack Welch.

At first I thought that this might be a simple rights and permission issue, but in the foreword of the book, “author” Chris Lauer thanks no fewer than 10 different publishing houses “who allowed the words and works of their authors to be featured in The Management Gurus.” No, this was simply a failure of imagination and marketing run amok, because The Management Gurus fails to deliver on its promise of bringing together “the best management books of all time” the same way the fast-food joint down the street fails to deliver on its promise of serving “the world’s best hamburger.

Don’t get me wrong; there is some decent and noteworthy management thinking and writing in The Management Gurus. Marshall Goldsmith is featured with an excerpt from What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful, and that certainly belongs in this volume. You can also make a case for the excerpts from Topgrading by Brad Smart (we’ve featured his thinking here in Workforce Management) and John C. Maxwell on Winning with People.

There are a few others, like Warren Bennis and Kenichi Ohmae, that are worth a look and some time, but really, is this enough high-level management writing (and thinking) to sustain the overhyped notion by the publisher that this book contains “lessons from the best management books of all time”?

Worst of all, this book has Jeffrey Krames writing on Jack Welch and The 4 E’s of Leadership. I don’t know Jeffrey Krames, but why would you possibly have someone like him writing about the management wisdom of Jack Welch instead of simply publishing an excerpt from one of the many management books written by the great Jack himself? It’s like traveling to China and seeing a movie about the Great Wall instead of walking on it yourself.

My advice is to take a pass on The Management Gurus. You would be better off getting a subscription to the Harvard Business Review—or better yet, reading firsthand some of the management books by real, honest-to-god business gurus like Drucker, Collins, Welch and Porter. This may take you a little more time, but it will be a lot more valuable. And a lot less full of hype.

There is a lot of concern over the state of the U.S. health care system, but there is another crisis brewing that anyone who manages workers—or who works, for that matter—can’t afford to ignore. In the next several years, more and more employees are going to find that they can’t afford to retire.

As Teresa Ghilarducci notes in her most recent book, When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them, retirement is a generally accepted part of the American Dream. After years of working hard, we will all be able to retire and enjoy a period of leisure before we die.

But this period of relaxation apparently is getting shorter and shorter. By 2010, 65-year-olds will be living longer than ever before. However, their expected months in retirement will fall by 14 percent, Ghilarducci writes.

So the good news is people are living longer, but the bad news is they are going to be working longer too.

Ghilarducci goes into great detail about why this is happening. She largely attributes the problem of inadequate retirement funds to the switch from defined-benefit plans to 401(k) plans.

There are lots of problems with 401(k)s, and many of Ghilarducci’s criticisms are not new, although I feel like they have been muffled a bit by the passage of the Pension Protection Act. The act, which took effect in 2007, encourages companies to put their 401(k)s on auto-pilot, so that employees are automatically enrolled in the plans. Most often these employees are enrolled into target-date funds, which reallocate to more conservative investments as the employee gets closer to retirement. Saving, and saving right, becomes a no-brainer. Or so the theory goes.

However the Pension Protection Act doesn’t solve all of the problems, and Ghilarducci notes many of the ones that remain. First, even with automatic enrollment, too often employees don’t contribute enough to their 401(k)s. Many times when workers switch jobs, they cash out their plans—causing another hit to their retirement savings. Many low-income workers don’t contribute to these plans at all. And nothing in the act addresses a major issue for retirees: how to make sure they don’t outlive their savings.

Those are just some of the concerns that Ghilarducci has about 401(k)s. Although many of these issues have been brought up by critics before, she does have some interesting theories on why 401(k)s have replaced traditional defined-benefit plans as the primary retirement savings vehicle at most companies.

Ghilarducci rejects two commonly held beliefs about this shift: that employees prefer 401(k)s and that pension plans cause companies to get into financial trouble.

On the first issue, the accepted notion is that 401(k)s make better sense for today’s workers, who are much more mobile than the lifers of 20 or 30 years ago. 

However, Ghilarducci provides evidence showing that workers don’t switch jobs as much as some of the hype would have us believe.

She cites statistics showing that the percentage of employees with more than 10 years of service in one job increased from 1996 to 2004—from 30.4 percent to 30.6 percent for men and from 27.9 percent to 28.6 percent for women.

Ghilarducci also doesn’t believe that defined-benefit plans are the reason that so many companies recently have declared bankruptcy. She argues that these companies were already well down that path to begin with, even if they didn’t have a pension plan.

According to Ghilarducci, the real reason that companies are shifting to 401(k)s is because the plans are better for employers—they take on less risk and less cost.

Again, that’s not a new argument, but Ghilarducci comes up with an interesting twist that I hadn’t heard before: She points out that companies can use 401(k) plans to reward their most productive employees. Ghilarducci cites research showing that productive employees are the most likely to contribute to their 401(k) plans, and thus receive the employer match.

“This in turn means that the employer is paying a higher wage to the most productive worker, which makes sense economically,” Ghilarducci writes. “In these ways, 401(k) plans not only reduce pension costs but are also clearly efficient forms of compensation.”

She goes a step further to imply that employers are setting up this whole system and promoting this culture of working in retirement because it suits their own needs.

Ghilarducci argues that the more retirees that continue to work, the greater the labor pool and thus the less pressure there is on employers to raise wages. “Working ‘retirees’ help manufacture healthy profits.”

OK, so it’s in the best interest for employers to keep us working, and it looks like many of us are going to have to anyway. So what’s working America to do?

Ghilarducci has an answer: guaranteed retirement accounts, which would be mandatory retirement savings accounts managed by the Social Security Administration and invested by the Thrift Savings Plan. Basically, employees would be required to contribute 5 percent of their earnings, which can be split with their employers, and instead of the contributions being tax-deferred, employees would receive a $600 tax credit. While 401(k) plans and their tax breaks could be maintained (because many high-income employees would still want them), Ghilarducci estimates that the guaranteed accounts, along with Social Security, could allow employees to retire when they want to and have 70 percent of their pre-retirement income.

Ghilarducci’s proposal is a bit more complex and has some nuances, but it’s very interesting and definitely something worth further examination.

I am not sure how feasible her idea is, given the heavily entrenched interests in the 401(k) industry (financial services companies, consultants, etc.). But again, I think the point is that the Pension Protection Act didn’t solve all of our retirement savings issues. It just shaved a little off the tip of the iceberg.

And although many employers may be concerned about the pending talent shortage, I very much doubt they want to retain disgruntled retirees who are working only because they have to.

Stewart Friedman hates the notion of work/life balance. He feels that it creates a sense of entitlement among employees and automatically pits those workers against their employers.

With work/life balance, it’s all about one portion of person’s life suffering for the sake of another. Friedman doesn’t believe it has to be that way.

In his new  book, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, Friedman talks about how people can be successful at home, at work, within their community and as individuals all at once. According to Friedman, the trick is taking a more integrated approach to how we view the different areas of our life, rather than trying to balance them all.

“Total Leadership represents a new step in the evolution for the work/life field: it is a systematic method for producing four-way wins that is tailored to fit the lives of individuals.”

Wow, that sounds lovely. But how do you do it?

Total Leadership provides readers with a series of exercises that they can do with one or more partners to figure out what their priorities are, who the core stakeholders are in their lives and what can they do to realign their lives to better meet their own needs, as well as the needs of the stakeholders.

I think Friedman’s book has a lot of great suggestions. The exercises are valuable, really, for anyone who feels that there are some disconnects between how they spend their time and how they’d like to be spending it. (And who doesn’t fall into that category?)

And I agree with Friedman’s thesis that there needs to be a new dialogue that goes beyond the idea of work/life balance. As a working mother of a young infant, I know all too well that there really is no such thing.

But I’m really skeptical about how likely it is that most people could sit down with their bosses and speak frankly about their needs. Even if they couch it in “I statements” and ask their bosses what they want from them, as Friedman suggests, I know a lot of people whose bosses don’t even ask them how their weekends were, let alone have conversations about how they are doing on a personal front.

The fact is that those employees who are feeling this disconnect the most are the ones whose bosses are least likely to be receptive to these conversations.

However, maybe this will start to change as employees become more disgruntled about their lack of work/life balance—or integration, as Friedman sees it.

As a result, it’s possible that more bosses are going to be forced into having these discussions, and if you are one of these bosses, Friedman’s Total Leadership would be a great book to share with your workforce.