MISMANAGERS
The decline in America's smoke stack industries is sparking a boom in books proposing cures. Industrial Renaissance (Basic Books; 194 pages; $19) places the blame for America's ills squarely at management's door. According to William Abernathy and Kim Clark, two Harvard business school professors, and Alan Kantrow, a Harvard Business Review editor, the problems are not due to a sluggish economy, overpriced labor or predatory competition from abroad, but to managers who "view their work through a haze of outdated assumptions and expectations." The book is an expanded version of a controversial 1980 article by Abernathy that was published in the...