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.