Who: A social psychologist and one of the first professors at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His landmark 1960 book, The Human Side of Enterprise, gave the practice of management a badly needed shot of humanism.

Big Idea: Theory X vs. Theory Y. McGregor described two very different approaches to management, each based on a different assumption about human behavior. The first approach, which he called Theory X, assumed that people avoid effort, work only for money and security, and therefore need to be controlled. The second, which he called Theory Y, assumed that work is as natural for human beings as play or rest, that initiative and creativity are widespread, and that if people are committed to a goal, they will actually seek responsibility. Theory Y, he argued, was the more accurate—and ultimately more effective—approach.

Type I Insight: “Managers frequently complain to me about the fact that subordinates ‘nowadays’ won’t take responsibility. I have been interested to note how often these same managers keep a constant surveillance over the day-to-day performance of subordinates, sometimes two or three levels below themselves.”

More Info: As I explained in Chapter 3, The Human Side of Enterprise is a key ancestor of Motivation 3.0. Although McGregor wrote the book a full fifty years ago, his observations about the limits of control remain smart, fresh, and relevant.

Who: The most influential management thinker of the twentieth century. He wrote an astonishing forty-one books, influenced the thinking of two generations of CEOs, received a U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and taught for three decades at the Claremont Graduate University Business School that now bears his name.

Big Idea: Self-management. “Drucker’s primary contribution is not a single idea,” Jim Collins once wrote, “but rather an entire body of work that has one gigantic advantage: nearly all of it is essentially right.” Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker,” foresaw the rise of the nonprofit sector, and was among the first to stress the primacy of the customer in business strategy. But although he’s best known for his thoughts on managing businesses, toward the end of his career Drucker signaled the next frontier: self-management. With the rise of individual longevity and the decline of job security, he argued, individuals have to think hard about where their strengths lie, what they can contribute, and how they can improve their own performance. “The need to manage oneself,” he wrote shortly before he died in 2005, is “creating a revolution in human affairs.”

Type I Insight: “Demanding of knowledge workers that they define their own task and its results is necessary because knowledge workers must be autonomous . . . workers should be asked to think through their own work plans and then to submit them. What am I going to focus on? What results can be expected for which I should be held accountable? By what deadline?”

More Info: Drucker wrote many books, and many have been written about him, but a great starting place is The Daily Drucker, a small gem that provides 366 insights and “action points” for putting his ideas into practice. On the topic of self-management, read Drucker’s 2005 Harvard Business Review article, “Managing Oneself.” For more information and access to digital archives of his writing, check out www.druckerinstitute.com.

Who: One of the most authoritative voices in business today and the author of Built to Last (with Jerry Porras), Good to Great, and, most recently, How the Mighty Fall. A former professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he now operates his own management lab in Boulder, Colorado.

Big Idea: Self-motivation and greatness. “Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time,” Collins wrote in Good to Great. “If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people?”

Type I Insight: Collins suggests four basic practices for creating a culture where self-motivation can flourish:

More Info: Collins’s website, www.jimcollins.com, contains more information about his work, as well as excellent diagnostic tools, guides, and videos.

Who: These two former human resources professionals at Best Buy persuaded their CEO to experiment with a radical new approach to organizing work. They wrote a book about their experiences, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, and now run their own consultancy.

Big Idea: The results-only work environment. ROWE, described in Chapter 4, affords employees complete autonomy over when, where, and how they do their work. The only thing that matters is results.

Type I Insight: Among the basic tenets of ROWE:

More Info: You can learn more about ROWE at their website: www.culturerx.com.

Who: “The world’s leading expert on business strategy,” according to BusinessWeek. He’s the coauthor of the influential book Competing for the Future, a professor of the London Business School, and the director of the California-based MLab, where he’s spearheading the pursuit of “moon shots for management”—a set of huge challenges to reform the theory and practice of running organizations.

Big Idea: Management is an outdated technology. Hamel likens management to the internal combustion engine—a technology that has largely stopped evolving. Put a 1960s-era CEO in a time machine and transport him to 2010, Hamel says, and that CEO “would find a great many of today’s management rituals little changed from those that governed corporate life a generation or two ago.” Small wonder, Hamel explains. “Most of the essential tools and techniques of modern management were invented by individuals born in the 19th century, not long after the end of the American Civil War.” The solution? A radical overhaul of this aging technology.

Type I Insight: “The next time you’re in a meeting and folks are discussing how to wring another increment of performance out of your workforce, you might ask: ‘To what end, and to whose benefit, are our employees being asked to give of themselves? Have we committed ourselves to a purpose that is truly deserving of their initiative, imagination, and passion?’ ”

More Info: Hamel’s The Future of Management (written with Bill Breen) is an important read. For more on Hamel’s ideas and research, see www.garyhamel.com and www.managementlab.org.