Mark H McCormack wrote his iconoclastic classic What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School in the late eighties, at a time when management guru-dom and a B-school degree were treated with breathless reverence. This was the age of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence and all its subsequent spin-offs, supplementing the more philosophical and rounded analyses of Peter Drucker with the sexier, case-study-driven approach to management strategy.
With What They Don’t Teach… McCormack, ever the sharp businessman, drove management literature out of the boardrooms, building on the kind of accessible, down-home management wisdom pioneered