Book review: strategic market planning—a blueprint for success. Patrick McNamee
✍ Scribed by Graham Beaver
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 40 KB
- Volume
- 8
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1086-1718
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Regular readers of the Journal will be only too aware that despite sterling attempts to bridge the divide between the academic and practitioner, the world of business publishing still remains in a state of intellectual Cold War. On one side of the commissioning Iron Curtain are the editors and publishing houses that produce materials for the academic community, with the emphasis on the needs for researchers, policy makers, lecturers and students. Here we can expect to ®nd meticulously argued papers, original and exciting new theoretical and conceptual books and empirically grounded student texts. On the other side, sit the editors who publish for the practising managerÐbooks and articles with a practical emphasis, packed with good advice, engagingly written (usually with a minimum of jargon) with immediate relevance for business management and corporate performance. Attempts to appeal to both communities inevitably come unstuck. The re¯ective practitioner' rarely seems to surface in the university bookshop and those responsible for the design and delivery of higher education programmes in business and management, appear unwilling (or unable) to endorse real world experience' that has not been validated and authenticated by the university system.
For the lecturer or professor considering a text to recommend for a component on a degree programme, practitioner books are, at worst, reductionist, acronym-laden quick ®xes, replete with bullet points and dubious metaphors, singularly lacking in any solid theoretical underpinning. Equally, for the business practitioner, academic books are often irrelevant and indigestible, barricaded inside an abstrusely argued, over-footnoted ivory towerÐand reading like a cure for insomnia. These positions are of course extremes of one another, but they do exist in uncomfortably large sections of each community, even in these enlightened times.
The fact is, to quote Mintzberg et al. (1998), `Practitioners read and are in¯uenced by the literature, just as the literature is in¯uenced by practice.' They go on to say that; Like butchers, the academics and consultants can chop up reality for their own convenience . . . Managers can allow