Whether it’s finance, marketing, production, strategy, human relations or any other discipline, managers accept that the subject is teachable and that, once taught, the lessons will bring value to managers and the organisations that employ them.

Jack Welch, of General Electric, based some of his awesome managerial reputation on the active role he played at the in-house college at Crotonville where GE’s executives were supposed to master their craft.

Welch is also one of the management heroes who have written books about their lives, times and management ideas. I’ve never doubted the potential value of this approach. That’s why I wrote the eight Business Masterminds for publishers Dorling Kindersley, picking as my masters a fascinating group of exemplars. The Masterclasses drawn from analysis of the octet’s successes are especially interesting – which is why we are making them available to all subscribers to Letter to Thinking Managers.

The credentials of the chosen are actually amazing. There’s Warren Buffett, who built the greatest investment fortune of all time from a base in Omaha, Nebraska. He’s recently turned over the bulk of that fortune to the charities run by Bill Gates, the biggest winner in the digital revolution – even though Buffett had steered clear of investing in Microsoft, because he didn’t understand the technology.

That was actually one of the Great Investor’s simple maxims – don’t invest in anything you can’t fully understand. That’s a difficult trick if you’re dealing with GE and Welch, for GE is so highly diversified that some analysts rightly call it more of a bank than the great electrical manufacturer it once was.

None of the above trio relied on technological brilliance to make their marks. Andy Grove of Intel, certainly, could not have led the microprocessor surge – changing the world in the process – without mastery of the design and engineering of his products.

The four businessmen in the Masterminds study are balanced by four teachers, whose personal business experience is confined to running their own shops. The late Peter Drucker, in fact, was at some pains to point out his lack of entrepreneurial ability.

Tom Peters, the loudest of the four teachers, is a managerial contrarian. He hot-gospels a new style that places initiative and enterprise above all else.

Unlike Peters and Drucker, the other two Mastermind thinkers don’t specifically apply themselves to the business of business. Charles Handy and Stephen Covey are philosophers of management. They are also deeply concerned with moral issues.

The principle behind the Masterclasses – 24 of them – is that, by working through key elements of the master’s practice you create a trial run for his theories and their application to you.

The reason why managers waste their time and money listening to advice they are never going to take is fear – fear of error. None of the eight Masters suffered this foolishness. The classes, and the examples, will help any manager to take the first steps in substituting bold confidence for weak anxiety.

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