Birkinshaw is a business school professor who is dedicated to the study of management. As the author himself declares, "management as we know it today is struggling to do the job it intended to do".

This is, he says, for two reasons: first, organisations and managers saw management in terms of the hierarchical, command-and-control model; and second, management got forgotten as the organisational and academic focus turned towards leadership.

Birkinshaw claims we need to relax our understanding of what management is and what it's for. He opts for "the discipline of getting work done through others". This looser description avoids tying managers down to any style of management. Instead it leaves them to select the most appropriate model for their environment.

Such models are little more than "the set of choices we make about how work gets done in an organisation". This book equips readers with a framework to start getting better at making smarter choices as to how they organise and manage.