THE WORLD is not short of management ideas. Search for the two words on Google and you find more than 16 million entries. But what passes for a management idea, too often ranges between the banal ("excellence in all things") and the blindingly obvious. One recent learned article was all about "stall points", the idea that companies have times when their businesses stall, when they just stop performing as brilliantly as they used to. Well, yeah, sure they do. My great auntie could tell you that.

What is written about these ideas, be they interesting or dull, is also frequently less than inspiring. "Each value stream within the operating system must be optimised individually from end to end," said one prize-winning book a few years ago.

Knowledge management "cannot be understood in terms of broad structural drivers", wrote one author recently.

He did not go on to suggest the terms in which it could be understood, and he did not actually use the words "knowledge management". He referred to it as KM, because he was well aware that it helps a management idea's authority greatly if it can be expressed as an acronym.

The three-letter variety seems to be the most powerful; it is certainly the most popular - there are TQM, BPR, JIT, ABC and CRM, to mention but a few. That's: total quality management; business process re-engineering; just-in-time delivery; activity-based costing; and customer-relationship management, for those of you not yet in the know.

More tosh is probably written about leadership than any other management issue. Authors cast about for famous leaders from history to imitate. Napoleon, Alexander and Shackleton are current hot role models; Shackleton because he gave up his goals rather than risk his "people" - a very popular idea at the moment, though I have not met too many Shackletons yet in the denizens of Silicon Valley or the major financial districts.

I particularly liked the management book that described Queen Elizabeth I's leadership style. When the good queen "seemed to vacillate, it was likely", claimed the book's author, "because the analytical and intuitive aspects of a pending decision were not in sync in terms of the action itself or its timing."

So, essentially, the poor dear couldn't make up her mind? Could it be that she was just waiting for a handsome fellow to throw a cloak beneath her pretty feet? The Harvard Business Review (HBR), the sine qua non for serious management students, nimbly avoids jargon for the most part. But it frequently indulges in deeply dense prose. It was responsible for the article on stall points, which appeared to try and disguise its fundamental great-auntie simplicity with an extraordinarily complicated definition.

"To qualify as having stalled in a given year," explained the authors, "a company must have enjoyed a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of at least 2 per cent in real dollars for the 10-year period prior to the potential stall point; the difference in CAGR for the 10 years preceding and the 10 years following, must have been at least four percentage points; and the CAGR of the subsequent 10 years must have fallen below 6 per cent in real dollars."

Are you glazing over yet? For sure. One thing at least is clear: just as with the erstwhile planet Pluto, it is marginally interesting for a few people to know that stall points exist. But as for their impact on the affairs of men? Zilch.

It is almost a century now since Frederick Winslow Taylor (FWT) The Principles of Scientific Management was published, the very first business bestseller that set out the idea of scientific management.

In it he outlines the theory that the rule-of-thumb methods of industrial working that had hitherto passed muster should be replaced with ones based on serious scientific study of the tasks that were being carried out.

Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management gurus since the second World War, said that Taylor "was the first man in history who did not take work for granted, but looked at it and studied it. His approach to work is still the basic foundation."

As with many of the best management ideas, it is difficult now to put ourselves back into the time before Taylor first set out with his stopwatch and white coat to measure his workers' productivity - to look at their time and their motion in order to find better ways for them to perform the tasks in hand.

When setting out to write my latest book, The Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus, my original aim was to come up with the 100 most inspiring management ideas since Taylor; almost one a year and a rough guide to what might have won the management Oscar each year (had there been one). Indeed, had there been one, it would surely have been called a 'Winslow', after FWT himself.

The Economist is alleged to have invented the term "management guru" some years ago to describe Tom Peters, a management consultant who once wrote an interesting book called In Search of Excellence.

I ended up with a list of 54 gurus (including Tom Peters for his earlier work), but there could as well have been 154. A large percentage of them are American - 34 have US nationality.

There is one Irishman, Charles Handy, who now lives in London and whom, perhaps because he was instrumental in setting up the London Business School, the English have almost claimed as their own.

While it is possible to argue about the presence and absence of individuals on the list, there is a small hard-core that no-one would disagree with, a group that I call the "Famous Five" - Frederick Winslow Taylor himself, Michael Porter, Alfred Sloan, Peter Drucker, and Douglas McGregor.

Taylor was an engineer who worked for the Bethlehem Steel Company in the 1880s where he pioneered the time and motion studies that subsequently led to his theory of scientific management. He had at least two things in common with the second name on the list, Michael Porter, apart from their gurudom.

Firstly, they were both exceptionally talented sportsmen - Taylor won the American national tennis doubles championship and Porter had to decide not to become a professional golfer - and secondly, they both trained first as engineers. Porter is the man who brought the economic theory of competition to corporate strategy. He helped explain to corporations how they could hope to gain competitive advantage over others by being cheaper or different.

Sloan was the chief executive of General Motors, a man who made the company a template for virtually all manufacturing organisations for at least three decades in the middle of the 20th century. He was the first to set up a management structure that he called "federal decentralisation", a structure in which he divided General Motors into separate autonomous divisions. These were largely independent and allowed to go their own way, subject only to financial and policy controls from a small central staff. It was a structure that was subsequently to become standard.

Sloan was a man of few words, known to his employees as Silent Sloan. But he managed to get a lot of words down on paper. His autobiography, My Years with General Motors, became a management classic and undoubtedly helped his reputation to endure and to blossom in the years after his retirement in 1956.

McGregor was a charismatic teacher who defined, for the first time, a fundamental dichotomy in management styles, a split between the authoritarian methods that often came with the military background of many post-war managers, and the laissez-faire attitudes that encouraged individuals to have free rein and to be self-motivating. He called the two styles Theory X (the command and control method) and Theory Y (the liberal method). This division has become fundamental to management thinking ever since. Warren Bennis, another guru, once said: "Just as every economist, knowingly or not, pays his dues to Keynes, we are all, in one way or another, disciples of McGregor."

Drucker was born in Germany before moving in the 1930s, first to the UK and then to the US where, upon arrival, he worked as a financial reporter. His first management book, The Concept of the Corporation, published in 1946, established his reputation as a guru who never lost touch with the reality of managers' lives. He never lost his ability to turn a memorable metaphor either.

In 1997, the McKinsey Quarterly said: "In the world of management gurus, there is no debate. Peter Drucker is the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow." And that subsequently proved to be the case.

In 2003, the Harvard Business Review ran its own poll, asking management gurus whom they thought should top a list of their kind. Drucker, the common manager's favourite, was also the gurus' favourite. While that did not elicit gasps of surprise, some of the other entries did. For example, in second place in the HBR's poll came James March, a little-known academic from Stanford University on the west coast of America. His work had been for the most part low-key.

Nevertheless, his writing is never dull. He has propounded what he calls "The Garbage-Can Theory of Organisational Choice". And one of his recent papers was called The Hot Stove Effect, named after Mark Twain's observation that cats that learn to avoid hot stoves learn to avoid cold ones too. In other words, managers learn to reproduce success in ways that cut them off from novel approaches to problems in the future.

All these gurus tend to have come from one of two backgrounds: they have first trained either as engineers - or in related sciences, like physics - or they have begun their academic studies in social sciences. Three of the Famous Five were engineers: Porter, Sloan and Taylor, as too were Michael Hammer and Taiichi Ohno, creator of the famous Toyota Production System. Among the social scientists were Douglas McGregor, James March and Abraham Maslow, inventor of the popular idea of the hierarchy of needs - that our needs come in order, and that we need to satisfy the lower-level ones first (thirst, hunger, etc) before we can move on to higher levels.

The highest level in his hierarchy Maslow called self-actualisation. "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy," he famously wrote. "What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation." The hierarchy of needs is an idea that has wide application outside the field of management. But it has been particularly influential in the design of employees' compensation packages.

Frequently, it has proven to be not so much what gurus have said that has established their reputations, but more the way that they have said it. People like Ted Levitt (who can lay claim to have first coined the term globalisation), Alvin Toffler (author of Future Shock), William Whyte (author of the wonderful The Organization Man) and even Peter Drucker have been outstanding as much for their illuminating writing as for what they were writing about. Pankaj Ghemawat, one of a new emerging breed of gurus with an Indian background, made his mark not so much through his critique of Thomas Friedman's ideas about globalisation, but by his creation of a great catchphrase. Friedman's view, he said, was "globalony". If you want a reader-friendly entry into management literature, start with a book by one of these men.

Gurudom bestows on its holder not only academic respectability in a field that has not always been sure of its status within higher education, but also the potential for great wealth.

Porter has made millions of dollars from his consulting business, based on his ideas about competitive advantage.

Now it is the turn of people like Dave Ulrich, whose ideas about how to transform human-resources departments have struck a chord with companies around the world.

They have finally come to realise that the mantra they have been repeating parrot fashion for years is actually true. Their people really are their most valuable asset. HR has been thrust into the limelight as the procurer of what managers have come to believe is the scarcest resource on the planet - namely, talent.

For the most part, business ideas are not produced for the greater good of mankind, or for the pure furtherance of knowledge. They are being produced like products to be sold again and again by management consultants, or by academics wearing their consultant's clothes.

The ideas factory works something like this. A business school professor or a consultant comes up with a bit of "research". This can be as basic as a round robin questionnaire to the chief executives of a subset of the Fortune 500 companies. Analysis of the findings is then used to demonstrate a correlation between two different things. For example, that companies which introduce activity-based costing improve their margins by X per cent over the following three years. Consultants who can show companies how to introduce activity-based costing can then improve their own margins by many times more than that.

The research is duly charted and neatly written up before being disseminated in an article. If the article is well received, the authors might subsequently be invited to expand it into a book to be published. In practice, this process sometimes works the other way round: the book comes out first and the article acts as a sort of trailer for the book. The HBR ideas factory has been churning out ideas in this way for some time. There are other similar factories, though smaller in scope, with much the same aim and methodology. One revolves around McKinsey, the consulting firm, and its publication, The McKinsey Quarterly; another around MIT and its prestigious publication, the Sloan Management Review. All these create a stream of verbiage emerging from Boston, much like a fog off the coast of Massachussetts.

More than 3,000 business titles a year are published in the US alone which means some of the really good stuff can easily get lost.

And there is lots of really good stuff - thoughts about the way we work together in organisations and how we can do it more efficiently, pleasantly, or whatever, for the benefit of us all.

Since most of us spend the majority of our waking hours in such situations, improving the quality of those hours is a very worthwhile goal.

Tim Hindle is a former finance editor, world business editor and management editor of The Economist. He is author of Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus (Profile Books: €25)