David Burkus – Under New Management: Book Review & Audio Summary

Book Info

• Book name: Under New Management: How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual
• Author: David Burkus
• Genre: Business & Economics
• Pages: 272
• Published Year: 2016
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Language: English

Audio Summary

Synopsis

In Under New Management, leadership expert David Burkus challenges conventional management wisdom that’s holding organizations back. Drawing from research and real-world examples from companies like Netflix, Whole Foods, and others, Burkus reveals why traditional management practices designed for the industrial age are failing knowledge workers. He presents revolutionary alternatives that prioritize employee satisfaction over rigid hierarchies, trust over micromanagement, and flexibility over control. Through compelling case studies and evidence-based insights, Burkus demonstrates how leading organizations are achieving remarkable results by upending business as usual. This book offers practical strategies for managers ready to embrace a new paradigm that recognizes work has fundamentally changed—and management must change with it.

Key Takeaways

• Prioritizing employee happiness directly leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty, making “employees first” a financially sound strategy
• Trust-based policies like unlimited vacation and flexible schedules actually reduce costs while increasing engagement and retention
• Team-based hiring decisions and paying disengaged employees to quit helps build cohesive, high-performing teams
• Knowledge work requires flexible management approaches that allow employees to self-organize rather than rigid hierarchies and job descriptions
• Traditional management tools designed for manual labor are obsolete in today’s creative, mental, and unpredictable work environment

My Summary

Why Your Management Playbook Might Be Obsolete

I’ll be honest—when I first picked up Under New Management, I was skeptical. Another business book promising to revolutionize how we work? But David Burkus won me over within the first chapter by asking a simple yet profound question: Would you try to repair a modern laptop with stone age tools?

Of course not. Yet that’s essentially what many managers are doing every day—applying industrial-age management techniques to knowledge work that requires completely different approaches. Burkus, who serves as a professor and leadership expert, has spent years researching organizational behavior, and this book distills his findings into actionable insights that challenge nearly everything we’ve been taught about management.

What struck me most about this book is how Burkus doesn’t just criticize outdated practices—he provides concrete alternatives backed by research and real-world success stories. As someone who’s worked in both traditional corporate environments and more progressive startups, I found myself nodding along and occasionally wincing at memories of misguided management decisions I’ve witnessed (and admittedly, sometimes made).

The Employee-First Revolution

We’ve all heard “the customer is king” so many times it’s become gospel. But Burkus flips this conventional wisdom on its head with a compelling argument: your employees should be your primary concern, and happy customers will naturally follow.

This isn’t just feel-good corporate rhetoric. Burkus cites a 2008 study by Stephen Brown and Sung Lam from the University of Houston that found a direct correlation between employee job satisfaction and customer perception of service quality. What’s fascinating is that this relationship holds even when customers have minimal direct contact with employees.

Think about that for a moment. Even customers who barely interact with your staff can sense when employees are engaged and satisfied. It’s like an invisible energy that permeates the entire organization—from the product quality to the way problems are solved to the overall customer experience.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. Years ago, I worked with a publishing house that treated its editors and designers terribly—constant overtime, micromanagement, no creative input. The books they produced were technically competent but lacked soul. Contrast that with another publisher I knew where employees had genuine autonomy and felt valued. Their books consistently won awards and developed loyal readerships. Same industry, different management philosophy, vastly different outcomes.

Trust as the Ultimate Management Tool

The key to creating happy, committed employees, according to Burkus, is trust. Not the lip-service kind of trust where managers say they trust you but still require three levels of approval for a simple decision. Real trust that manifests in concrete policies.

Netflix serves as Burkus’ prime example. The streaming giant has no standard working hours and no formal vacation policy. Employees set their own schedules based on their workloads and take time off at their discretion. For travel expenses, there’s just one rule: act in Netflix’s best interest.

Most traditional managers would predict chaos from such policies. Instead, Netflix experienced reduced costs, higher engagement, and better retention. Why? Because when you treat adults like adults, they generally rise to the occasion. When you treat them like children who need constant supervision, they often behave accordingly.

This resonates deeply with my own experience as a writer and blogger. The most productive periods of my career have been when I had complete autonomy over my schedule and approach. The least productive? When someone was constantly checking in, questioning my methods, and imposing arbitrary deadlines that had nothing to do with the actual work requirements.

Rethinking How We Build Teams

Burkus dedicates significant attention to hiring practices, and his insights here are particularly valuable in today’s competitive talent market. The conventional approach—a manager or HR person interviews candidates and makes a unilateral decision—is fundamentally flawed for knowledge work.

Why? Because even star performers don’t necessarily excel when transferred to new companies. Research shows that top performers need the right team and organizational context to thrive. Strip away those conditions, and the “star” often becomes just another average employee. Meanwhile, their arrival can create conflicts and disrupt team dynamics that were previously working well.

The Whole Foods Approach to Hiring

Burkus highlights Whole Foods’ team-based hiring process as a better alternative. When Whole Foods considers a new employee, they have that person work with the team they’d be joining for several weeks. Then the team votes on whether to bring them on permanently.

This approach recognizes a fundamental truth: the people who will work directly with the new hire are best positioned to assess cultural fit and team compatibility. They’re the ones who will experience the consequences of a bad hire or reap the benefits of a good one.

I love this idea, though I’ll admit it requires a level of organizational maturity and trust that many companies haven’t developed. It means genuinely empowering teams and accepting that they might make different choices than management would. But if you’re serious about building cohesive, high-performing teams, it’s worth the discomfort.

The Counterintuitive Strategy: Pay People to Quit

Perhaps the most provocative idea in this section is Burkus’ recommendation to pay disengaged employees to leave. This might sound wasteful, but the logic is sound. Disengaged employees are productivity drains who spread negativity, skip work, and underperform. Yet they often stay simply because they’ve already invested so much effort in getting and learning the job.

By offering a financial incentive to quit, you’re helping these employees overcome the sunk cost fallacy and move on to something better suited to them. Meanwhile, you’re protecting your engaged employees from the toxic influence of disengaged colleagues.

Companies like Amazon and Zappos have famously implemented “pay to quit” programs, and the results speak for themselves. The employees who stay are genuinely committed, while those who were just going through the motions move on with some financial cushion to ease the transition.

Managing Knowledge Workers in the Modern Economy

The heart of Burkus’ argument is that work has fundamentally changed. We’ve moved from an economy based primarily on manual labor and physical production to one dominated by knowledge work—writing code, analyzing data, creating content, solving complex problems, and teaching others.

This shift has profound implications for management. The strict hierarchies, rigid schedules, and detailed job descriptions that worked reasonably well for factory workers are disastrously ill-suited for knowledge work.

Knowledge work is inherently unpredictable and creative. You can’t schedule innovation for Tuesday afternoon from 2-4 PM. You can’t mandate that someone will have a breakthrough insight if they just follow the proper procedure. And you certainly can’t micromanage creativity into existence.

The Case for Self-Organization

Burkus argues that knowledge workers need flexibility and the ability to self-organize. This doesn’t mean chaos or lack of accountability—quite the opposite. It means trusting teams to organize their work in ways that make sense for the specific challenges they’re facing.

In traditional management, the manager assigns tasks, sets deadlines, and monitors progress. In self-organizing teams, the team collectively determines how to approach problems, who should work on what, and how to measure success. The manager’s role shifts from director to facilitator—removing obstacles, providing resources, and maintaining alignment with broader organizational goals.

This approach is particularly relevant in today’s fast-paced business environment where market conditions and customer needs change rapidly. Self-organizing teams can adapt much more quickly than traditional hierarchical structures where every decision needs to flow up and down the chain of command.

As someone who runs Books4soul.com, I’ve had to learn this lesson myself. When I first started bringing on contributors and assistants, I tried to direct every aspect of their work. The result? Bottlenecks, frustration, and mediocre output. When I shifted to setting clear goals but letting people determine their own approaches, quality improved dramatically and everyone (including me) was happier.

Practical Applications for Your Organization

Reading about progressive management practices is one thing; implementing them is another. Here are some concrete ways to apply Burkus’ insights, regardless of your organization’s size or industry:

Start with Small Trust Experiments

You don’t need to immediately eliminate all vacation policies and working hours. Start small. Maybe let your team set their own schedules for one day a week. Or eliminate approval requirements for expenses under a certain amount. Monitor the results, gather feedback, and expand what works.

The key is demonstrating trust through action, not just words. Every small policy change that says “we trust your judgment” builds the foundation for larger cultural shifts.

Involve Teams in Hiring Decisions

Even if you can’t implement Whole Foods’ full trial period approach, you can involve team members in interviews and give their input significant weight. At minimum, have candidates meet with their potential teammates, not just managers. The insights you gain will be invaluable.

I’ve started doing this with Books4soul.com. When I’m considering bringing on a new regular contributor, I have them interact with my existing team. The questions my team asks and their gut reactions have saved me from several hiring mistakes.

Audit Your Policies for Unnecessary Control

Take an honest look at your organization’s policies. How many exist because they’re genuinely necessary versus because “that’s how we’ve always done it” or because you don’t trust employees? Every policy that treats employees like potential thieves or slackers erodes engagement and creativity.

This doesn’t mean eliminating all rules—some structure is necessary. But question whether each policy serves a real purpose or just satisfies a manager’s need for control.

Create Feedback Loops

Regularly solicit honest feedback from your team about what’s working and what isn’t. More importantly, actually act on that feedback. Nothing destroys trust faster than asking for input and then ignoring it.

Make it safe for people to voice concerns and suggestions. Anonymous surveys can help initially, but the goal should be creating enough psychological safety that people feel comfortable speaking up directly.

Measure What Matters

Traditional management often focuses on easily measurable but ultimately meaningless metrics—hours worked, emails sent, meetings attended. Knowledge work requires different metrics focused on outcomes and impact rather than activity.

What actually matters for your organization’s success? Customer satisfaction? Innovation rate? Quality of work? Design your measurement systems around those outcomes, not around monitoring whether people are “looking busy.”

Strengths and Limitations of Burkus’ Approach

Under New Management is strongest when presenting research-backed alternatives to conventional wisdom. Burkus doesn’t just say “trust your employees”—he provides evidence that trust-based policies produce better business outcomes. The case studies from companies like Netflix, Whole Foods, and others ground his arguments in reality rather than theory.

I also appreciate that Burkus acknowledges these approaches require courage and may feel uncomfortable initially. He’s not promising an easy path, just a better one.

However, the book does have limitations. Most of the examples come from relatively progressive, well-resourced companies. Implementing these practices in more traditional industries or organizations with entrenched cultures is more challenging than Burkus sometimes acknowledges.

Additionally, while Burkus touches on potential pitfalls, I would have appreciated more discussion of what to do when these approaches don’t work. Not every employee thrives with unlimited autonomy. Not every team is ready for self-organization. The book could benefit from more guidance on handling these situations.

Finally, some of Burkus’ recommendations require a level of organizational trust that takes time to build. If you’re managing a team that’s been micromanaged for years, you can’t just flip a switch and expect everyone to immediately embrace autonomy. The transition process deserves more attention.

How This Book Compares to Other Management Literature

Under New Management fits into a growing body of literature challenging traditional management practices. It shares DNA with books like Daniel Pink’s “Drive,” which explores motivation in knowledge work, and Ricardo Semler’s “Maverick,” which chronicles radical management experiments at a Brazilian company.

Where Burkus excels is in synthesizing research across multiple domains—psychology, organizational behavior, economics—into actionable insights. He’s less philosophical than Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” and more practical than academic treatments of organizational theory.

If you’ve read and enjoyed “Creativity, Inc.” by Ed Catmull or “Powerful” by Patty McCord (Netflix’s former Chief Talent Officer), Under New Management will feel like a natural complement. It covers similar territory but with broader scope across different industries and organizational types.

Questions Worth Pondering

As I finished Under New Management, several questions stuck with me:

How much of traditional management is actually about control rather than effectiveness? And what does it say about our organizations that we’ve built such elaborate systems based on distrust?

Also, what would happen in your organization if you eliminated your three most burdensome policies tomorrow? Would chaos ensue, or would people rise to the occasion? And if you’re not sure, what does that uncertainty reveal about the current state of trust in your workplace?

Final Thoughts from a Fellow Traveler

Under New Management isn’t just another business book—it’s a genuine challenge to examine whether our management practices match the reality of modern work. Burkus has given us both the research and the roadmap to do better.

As I implement these ideas at Books4soul.com and reflect on my broader career experiences, I’m convinced that the shift from control to trust, from hierarchy to self-organization, and from employee-as-resource to employee-as-priority isn’t just more humane—it’s more effective.

The organizations that thrive in the coming decades will be those that recognize work has fundamentally changed and have the courage to change their management practices accordingly. The question is: will yours be one of them?

I’d love to hear your experiences with implementing progressive management practices or struggling against outdated ones. What’s worked in your organization? What’s been surprisingly difficult? Drop your thoughts in the comments below—this conversation is too important to keep to ourselves.