ABSTRACT
The fault line that was opening up between theory and practice did not go unnoticed. From the late 1970s another group of management thinkers and writers began trying to reconnect with the business world. In doing so they were, sometimes quite overtly, following the path already laid by Peter Drucker. The phenomenal success of his books from the 1960s onward showed that there was an appetite for theory and ideas among practising managers, if those theories and ideas were relevant and were presented in an appealing way. In response, from the 1970s through to the end of the 1990s there emerged a group of thinkers who became known – not always flatteringly – as the ‘gurus’.
