John Hartman, who died April 5 at 84, was chief executive of Bill Communications Co., a trade magazine publisher with a dozen titles, among them Restaurant Business, Successful Meetings, and Sales and Marketing magazine.

A self-styled management guru with a sui generis personality, he published several books, including “Maverick Management” (1990), and several volumes of musings titled “Second Thoughts.”

At New York-based Bill Communications, Hartman added titles including Modern Tire Dealer and Plastic Technology to the stable, while devolving management responsibility and stock ownership to employees. He called his technique “bottoms-up management” and claimed it was taught at Harvard Business School.

Hartman came to publishing through his wife, an heir to the Bill Brothers Publishing Co., founded in 1889. In its early days the company published such titles as Musical Trade Review and Talking Machine World. In 1920, the company introduced Sales magazine, a staple of an emerging industry.

John Wheeler Hartman was brought up in Detroit and attended Columbia and Duke universities before going into the Navy during World War II. After the war, he reported for a Navy newspaper, the Inlander, and the United Press. He later founded an advertising agency in St. Augustine, Fla.

At Bill Brothers Publishing, Hartman moved up to CEO and began introducing new titles and a new organization. “I decided to turn the table of organization upside down,” he told Duke magazine in 1992. “And then I threw it out.”

When he sold the privately owned company to Boston Ventures in 1989, the price was reportedly in excess of $100 million.

Retirement for Hartman meant going back to writing. He had a column in Advertising Age in which he included war stories from his days in the CEO’s chair and pontificated on the course of marketing — he predicted a great future for subliminal advertising.

He summered in Lyme, Conn., where he wrote for the Shoreline Press. At his full-time home in Key Largo, Fla., he covered society news and real estate shenanigans for the Free Press. “He carries a hammer, but it’s a velvet hammer,” his editor at the Free Press once said.

At Duke, he created a center for advertising history, including the corporate archives of the J. Walter Thompson Co., at Duke’s Perkins Library.

Hartman was predeceased by his wife, Esther Kelly Bill; he is survived by a daughter, Kelly Sherwood, a son, Raymond Hartman, and two grandchildren.