Coping with strategic risk

It is no slip of a copywriter's pen that The Financial Times Handbook of Management is subtitled "the state of the art". It is predicated upon the observation that as we move from what it calls "the machine age" to the "information age", so management has had to drop its claim to being a science. Whereas previously management prided itself on quantifying, controlling and predicting, now it is about empathy, empowerment and coping with uncertainty. Every area of business endeavour has become an imponderable. "The boundaries are gone. The game has changed. The rule book is out of date," says Professor Gary Hamel in the foreword. This then is the rule book for business in the new millennium, and the first rule is that there are no rules. Even at 940 pages it doesn't pretend to be definitive or exhaustive. Managers hoping to find a crash course in 21st-century business techniques will be disappointed. It offers no immediate solutions (after all there are none) but is designed as a starting point for further thinking and reading.