cover image The Management Game

The Management Game

Ardis Burst, Leonard A. Schlesinger. Viking Books, $18.95 (274pp) ISBN 978-0-670-81225-7

As a means of teaching and testing management skills, Harvard Business School teachers Burst and Schlesinger here fictionalize a year in the life of a division president for a giant food conglomerate as he faces a series of problems. Each chapter presents a different challengechoosing the right advertising campaign, appraising the human factor at a small-town subsidiary that may have to be closed, selecting a submanager via modern (i.e., polygraph) screening methods, reacting to ""creative'' bookkeeping suggested from above and so forthwith various options offered in each case to which the reader is invited to respond. At the close is an analysis of each option's results in terms of the reader's skills, as well as the division's corporate profitability and the division president's own future prospects. A novel and intriguing study that makes a game of learning about business management. (September)