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The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical review of the work of Tom Peters.

Notes a degree of narrative experimentation in the works of Tom Peters. Offers a narrative typology to describe this narrative change, suggests a number of reasons for this narrative experimentation and outlines topics for future research in this area.

The paper suggests that Peters' narrative experimentation reflects twin frustrations. Namely Peters' frustration with the short‐term orientations and innate conservatism of the US business élite and peripheralization in Corporate America.

The paper proposes an original narrative typology for the examination of Peters' work and suggests directions for future research.

Increasingly, managers are harried by rapidly accelerating technological changes, globalization, and new competitors. How can they cope with the mercurial environments their firms are facing today? Should they stop wasting precious time thinking strategically and instead concentrate on action? Should they forget about careful pre‐planning and use their energy to try enough different approaches so some will surely succeed? Has strategizing as we know it become obsolete in today's chaotic environment?

An overview of all the elements that go into formulating a business strategy – including received wisdom from the gurus, vision and values, ideas on growth, forecasting, information, objectives, audits, customers, markets, competition, finances, structure, training – with the focus on how to make it happen. Directed at practising managers whose task this is. Making strategic plans is the easy bit; enacting them requires changing things, getting things done through people. Discusses learning, training and development, culture, quality, with the emphasis on real people in real businesses. Underpinned by the philosophy of “action learning”.

In this article, the author tries to discover the real China. Having conducted seminars in different regions of the country, he recounts his thoughts and experiences. From a typical grimy, industrial city like Datong near Beijing, he flies just two hours south to the province of Guangdong and is greeted by a totally different world. Near here are world‐class hotels, Western clothes instead of the dull “Mao suits” and the streets teeming with thousands of small businesses. So which is the real China? The answer, it appears, is that right now there are two Chinas. However, while cities such as Guangdong are China′s aspiration at this point, the Datongs are still China′s reality.

To increase the odds of survival, leaders at all levels must become obsessive about change. Change must become the norm, not cause for alarm. Questions such as “What, precisely, exactly, unequivocally, have you changed — today?” are deceptively simple but most often go unasked. They are, however, according to the author, far and away the most crucial questions for all today's managers, at all levels.

Outlines the introduction of a new service dubbed InfoEyes that was launched early in 2004 to provide online reference services and related information training specifically for print‐impaired individuals. InfoEyes is a multi‐state project involving libraries for the blind and print impaired in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Briefly reports on the genesis, planning, and the first few months of the pilot test phase.

Bureaucracy is under attack and has been for some time, specially these past 30 years. This chapter will outline the specific qualities of bureaucracy, the challenges to it that different critics have posed and the possible futures of bureaucracy that are being imagined. In the 1980s, as a key part of an extremely liberal and influential critique of bureaucracy, new imaginings of how to organize corporations and public sector organizations began to emerge. By the late 1990s these had morphed into a view of the network or hybrid organization as the way of the future. The chapter will suggest that the global future of bureaucracy is not as simple as some of these criticisms suggest when they see it left behind in the emergence of innovative new forms. Instead, it is suggested, there is a spatial disaggregation of organizations occurring that heralds some unsettling new futures of organizations emerging.

This is a paper about the soft and hard drivers for English sub-national governance. It posits that the recurrence of claims for inter-urban linkages across the two distinct conurbations of the North-West of England have been bedevilled by entrenched differences in the leadership cultures of the city-regions.

It contrasts the highly localised forms of ‘soft power’ – or the ways in which leaders mobilise brands, plans and strategies to tell stories about place – arguing that there is a considerable divergence between the way that this symbolic capital has been deployed within and across the two city-regions. Whilst this is striking it is still true that ‘Hard powers’ – fiscal, legislative or regulatory mechanisms – are elusive for both Manchester and Liverpool notwithstanding recent moves towards combined authorities for both places. The only model of English urban governance with statutory powers covering transport, economic development and planning is located in Greater London, a legacy of the post-RDA institutional landscape in England.

This paper argues that it would be extraordinary if forms of leadership capable of meaningfully connecting the two cities cannot be found but that this must be seen within a sclerotic English context where there is a huge disconnect between desirable form and functions of urban governance, and the effect this has on regional economic performance. It concludes that local government austerity has had a negative effect on the sort of ‘soft power innovations’ necessary in both cities and that rhetorics of English localism have provided neither a propitious context for inter- nor intra-urban governance innovation.

This paper seeks to describe some of the ways in which collaborations within the city-regions of Manchester and Liverpool have been achieved, making the case that there have been divergent governance experiments which may hamper the aspiration for extensions beyond their border and for intra-urban leadership and governance which combines the two great cities and their areas of influence.

Creativity and innovation concern the process of creating and applying new knowledge. As such, they are at the very heart of Knowledge Management. This paper first creates a framework in which to discuss these issues. It goes on to explore how our creativity is “blocked” in a variety of ways, including deep‐seated beliefs about the world. Finally, this paper takes a brief look at two tools to support Knowledge Management and creativity: dialogue and groupware.