Growth-manager

Tom Morris

The authors take you through a series of topics that make you appreciate why 'great' managers are great. These topics can be viewed as good ole common sense, but unfortunately one realizes how often we don't demonstrate common sense. The book is full of questions - situations that all managers encounter, along with several effective ways of handling each situation so that every wins - your company, your employess and you, the manager - good practical techniques that everyone can put to use.

This is not the kind of book to rest on your libary shelf. Read it and pass it on.

KPMG's risk management advice is coupled with interesting, colorful and very enjoyable interviews with top executives at British Airways, Oracle, Microsoft, Sprint, shipping giant P&O and others. Even General Barry McCaffrey chimes in with his thoughts on business lessons from the battlefield.

In all, an engaging read that I recommend for my peers but not my competitors.

If you want to develop your management skills and achieve your objectives, take a peek at this tiny resource book. While it isn't an all encompassing management book like the Essential Manager's Manual, it is easy to read and you can deal with one specific issue at a time. There are many books in the Essential Managers Series.

Robert Heller will show you how to build key attributes, develop confidence, master risk taking, lead effectively, stay in shape, increase learning, think more effectively, write and speak more fluently, boost your creativity, choose priorities, understand money, reduce stress, reassess your goals, find a mentor, take the lead and plan ahead.

I especially enjoyed the little hints placed in yellow boxes throughout the book. Here are some of my favorites:

Hint 97: Avoid changing your opinions to match those of the majority. Hint 42: Do not confuse wild, far-out, impractical ideas with creativity.

So, how will you know if you have achieved success in a particular area of your personal management qualities portfolio? Page 66-69 is a self-assessment which you can take to evaluate your achievement. As you work towards excellence, realize this is a lifelong challenge.

Many people in an organization focus on managing the boss rather than doing their own job. What better way to manage the boss than to constantly seek her/his guidance on everything? Then, the boss can be flattered that you want his/her help, and will also take the blame if anything goes wrong. Insecure bosses like to be involved, so that fewer "errors" occur.

This wonderful book points out that no one can learn without making errors. Also, if you and your subordinate are doing the same job, one of you is superfluous. A common source of stalled thinking in this area is focusing on the fact that you, as manager, can do the job better and faster than you can teach the task or job to someone. What managers fail to realize is that someone closer to the source of the problem should be able to come up with a better solution. Also, the time taken to teach someone else to do the task is usually much less over a year or two than the time taken to help someone learn the task.

The key problem is that we all like to fall back on doing what we are comfortable with and are good at rather than new challenges where we are not so competent. Banish that feeling!

This book gives you lots of practical ideas for how to respond to efforts by your subordinates and colleagues to delegate their work and responsibility to you. You will learn how to see them coming and to keep the monkey where it belongs: with them.

If you find that you are pressed for time, this book is an important source of ideas to free up your life to have less stress while you and your organization both accomplish more.

Good luck with taking care of your monkey business! It's an important step toward developing an irresistible growth enterprise.

A good meter for a manager to know if he has too many monkeys is by comparing e-mail inbaskets, since that is where so many of us spend much of our time nowadays. My own is usually over 300 items while my staff's is usually under 20. I thought about each of these as a monkey and then also thought back over all the one-on-one conversations I had had with each of them (7 people). In most cases, it was usually left that I would do something next, and that fits in perfectly with this book. True to the book and the tape, I spend countless hours to catch up, only to fall further behind.

The book is pretty good, but the tape is far superior. There are two tapes; the first one is a speech by Bill Oncken Jr, and he is just a fantastic story-teller. He really brings to life the story of the manager whose staff is all waiting on him, the stress he feels, and the revelation that hits him when he sees them golfing when he goes in on the weekend. Of course this is all written before the days of e-mail, but it still works. You can feel the energy in his voice rising as he turns his life around and puts all the monkeys back where they belong, and the final line where he gets the whole audience to shout "HOW'S IT GOING?!" to the new monkey-owner is a great ending.

The second tape is Ken Blanchard delivering the rest of the material, and while he's entertaining, it's not nearly as good as Oncken's "day-in-the-life" tale. He ties the material back to the One-Minute Manager, and touches on some psychological issues.

They also stress that this isn't just an exercise in delegating and taking work off the manager's hand, it is just as important as a developmental process for the subordinate.

As a side-note, it's interesting that there is no mention anywhere in the book of Spencer Johnson, the co-author of the original book The One Minute Manager, who invented the system. In all the author biographies and Thank-You's, he is never mentioned, I wonder if he and Blanchard had a parting of company. And the book itself makes almost no mention at all about what One-Minute Manager is all about, it seems just a way to put a popular title to a book about monkey management,
although I think this monkey manual is the better book.

How many times have you heard the story line: "Our parents worked for one company all their lives - our children will change jobs often before they reach retirement age." If many will change jobs, one of them just might be us.

Mr. Bowen's article faces the problem with a positive outlook! It is not an article to fix all the "fired" manager's problems. His 8 steps to prepare are thought starters for us all. Take the positive encouragement he provides and be ready. Use them to build a "kudo" file for your accomplishments.

If you never have to face being replaced, you have a file full of positive. When you are having a negative day, open your desk drawer and read how good, important and what a positive influence you truely are to your company.

The truth is that many will change jobs and that change may not be of our own choosing. You will be able to thank Mr. Bowen for having prepared you for change - or helping you identify the positive productful person that sits in your chair!

To gather the information they needed, Katzenbach and his associates at McKinsey & Company (the "RCL Team") examined more than 30 different change situations and interviewed more than 150 change leaders. In the Introduction, they discuss seven common characteristics among the RCLs and then cite three shared beliefs:

1. "Tough standards of performance, but not just financial performance; customer value and workforce rewards are important as well.

2. "A set of democratic principles that tap the creative power inherent in every person; but they also enforce consequence management, believing they can truly empower people only by requiring results in return.

3. "The essence of self-governance is joint accountability (among leaders and constituents alike) for creating new opportunity; the basic approach is open dialogue and interaction to resolve conflicts by working to obtain the best contributions from multiple points of view."

The material is organized within three Parts: People-Intensive Change, Engaging the Organization, and Leadership Capacity and Growth. Throughout the book, the reader is provided with immensely informative as well as convenient charts (eg "Differences Between 'Good Managers' and RCLs) which feature key points. I have already noted "The Real Change Leader's Handbook for Action" (pages 341-391 in the softbound edition) which, in effect, gives each reader a template as well as a frame-of-reference to implement whichever combination of concepts, strategics, and tactics is most appropriate. The "Handbook" offers comments, suggestions, checklists and frameworks "for getting started in areas where change leadership help is needed."

For me, one of the book's greatest values is derived from its response to the question, "What distinguishes a real change leader from traditional managers?" The answer may in some ways surprise you, as it did me. For example, "Real change leaders do not care if the change effort is fast or slow, empowered or controlled, one-time or recurring, cultural or engineered -- or all of the above. They only care that it is people-intensive, and performance oriented....Simply put, real change leaders learn how to survive and win in the delta state, while traditional managers can only survive in the current state or the future state." The real change leader is committed to delivering results beyond the bottom line and instilling a working vision in the hearts and minds of associates while doing whatever is the right thing to do. They help others to perform above expectations (especially their own), constantly nourishing relations with customers while developing and applying the skills needed to remain flexible. Over time, they achieve results with a no-excuses mindset.

If you share my high regard for this book, I urge you to check out O'Toole's Leading Change and Hamel's Leading the Revolution as well as Buckingham and Coffman's First, Break All the Rules.

"Do not concede ground unless you receive something in return." -pg. 49 "Be flexible-it is a sign of strength, not of weakness." -pg. 11

If you have been in a car accident and can't solve the case with your insurance company, you might want to look at the Arbitration section. If you need a third party, a mediator could also be useful. A section on body language enables you to determine the attitude of the person you are negotiating with.

A nice handy guide which you could give out to all the managers in your company. It would also be a nice gift for anyone who makes proposals to obtain new business. You will feel pretty confident after reading this book.

There is a lot of business-oriented material in the book that won't necessarily apply to my new (prospective) position as an outdoor-science school Program Director. Still it may be valuable some day and the examples served to clarify the material presented.

The book was a fast read and I made checkmarks in the margin so that I can review the material. I read it mainly to help me come up with ways I would handle situations that may be posed to me as part of my interview, and I think that it served this purpose well.

What the CEO wants you to know is a very easy and quick read. It brings together a lot of the basic factors that affect a business operation. What the CEO wants you to know views these basic factors as a whole with a perspective on how they interact.

What the CEO wants you to know is a good get back to the basics that matter for the business executive. For any employee this book is a good view in what top management should be considering and how you can impact the company's top and bottom line (the book also covers what these terms mean). I recommend this book.

If you are like me, after reading this book you will have some of the non-technical tools needed to deal with those impromptu invitations to the board meeting.

It will be in my reference shelf for years to come!

I personally have a degree in accounting, an MBA in finance and I worked in corporate strategy. I found this book definitely worth the while and ranks up in the top 2 of overall general business books I have read. I am just now starting to put my reviews online.