Business Feel: From the Science of Management to the Philosophy of Leadership

Just as a good musician has a feeling for rhythm and a sports person has a feeling for the game, so a good businessperson has a well-developed sense of business feel.

How do we develop our business feel? How does an understanding of business feel enhance our business judgement, our ability to trust our intuition, think on our feet, make and execute decisions?

Steven Segal, who lectures in management at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management and the Sydney Graduate School of Management, examines these questions by looking at the life experiences of CEO's who are recognised for excellence in their feel for the business.

The aim of the book is to enable managers to achieve excellence in their practice by learning how to turn disruptive management experiences into learning opportunities. The key to doing this, Segal argues, is learning the philosophical skills of management.

Management, he argues, "is caught between the collapse of an old way of doing things and the not-yet of a new set of conventions or habits. A question that we need to ask is: how do we operate when we do not have road signs to guide us? Indeed how do we begin to establish new road signs?"

The book is written in such a way that it can be read on a number of

levels: for for the practising manager it can be read as a series of skills that allow him or her to reflect on their practices. For the management theorist it provides a framework to examine the transition from a scientific to a philosophical account of management. For the management educator it provides an educational process for learning from experience. For the consultant, it provides a framework to integrate theory and practice and for the philosopher it opens up the realm of the practical.