How To Be Your Own Management Guru

Morgen Witzel

Description

How smart a manager are you? How good are you at leveraging your knowledge and skills in order to provide value for your business and your customers? How smart is your management team when it comes to understanding both the fundamentals of business, and new trends?How to be your own Management Guru is the perfect answer to those looking to master the fundamentals of managing in the modern world: how to make and implement strategy; how to understand and respond to customer needs; how to manage and get the best out of people; and above all, how to use knowledge.Drawing on both business research and examples of best practice from around the world, past and present, How To Be Your Own Manager Guru will help readers to manage more effectively, and to do business the smart way.The book features:Key areas crucial for management in the twenty-first centuryQuizzes to test yourself, and your businessesHow to identify what are you doing well? What are you doing less well, and how might you improve?

Sujets

• Gestion et management
• Economics

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
• Date de parution: 12 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184758016
• Langue: English

Extrait

MORGEN WITZEL
How To Be Your Own Management Guru
Contents
About the Author
Foreword
Introduction
P ART O NE : T HE M IND OF T HE M ANAGER
1. Leadership
2. Core competencies
3. The long term
4. Continuous improvement
5. Entrepreneurship
P ART T WO : T HE M ANAGER AND THE F IRM
6. Innovation
7. Matrix organization
8. Virtual organization
9. Supply chain
10. Efficiency
P ART T HREE : T HE M ANAGER AND THE W ORLD
11. Strategic thinking
12. Globalization
13. Mergers and acquisitions
14. Corporate governance
15. Business ethics
P ART F OUR : T OOLS OF THE T RADE
16. Costing
17. Benchmarking
18. 360 degree feedback
19. Four Ps
20. Brand saliency
Conclusion: The Sum of All Quizzes
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
HOW TO BE YOUR OWN MANAGEMENT GURU
Morgen Witzel is an internationally known writer, lecturer and consultant. He is honorary senior fellow at the University of Exeter Business School, senior consultant with the Winthrop Group of business historians, and editor in chief of Corporate Finance Review . His fourteen previous books including Management: The Basics , Fifty Key Figures in Management , Builders and Dreamers: The Making and Meaning of Management , Doing Business in China , Managing in Virtual Organisations and the forthcoming Management History: Text and Cases . His more than two thousand articles, essays and reviews have spanned many different aspects of management, from strategic thinking and organisation to business ethics and corporate social responsibility. He has written the Gurumantra column for the Smart Manager since 2002. He is currently researching a profile of the Tata corporate brand, Brand Tata , to be published by Penguin India in 2010.
Foreword
J ARGON, CLICH S AND BUZZWORDS: IT S HARD to avoid them in our daily lives. More so in work spaces, even though they have a slightly derogatory air about them. Yet they serve several useful purposes. Jargon is born as a verbal shortcut developed during the performance of a routine activity inside an organization; a clich is the compact expression of a collective experience; and a buzzword is an articulated trend, one which begins as a precursor before declining into either jargon or clich .
Most managers have their favourite jargon, clich s and buzzwords which they use frequently. Yet astonishingly, very few truly understand the correct or entire meaning of the words they lavishly use to portray themselves as being forward thinking, intelligent, cool, fashionable or a member of an inner club or circle.
The book you hold in your hand began as the Gurumantra section in The Smart Manager , a section launched to create greater awareness of the meaning and profoundness of simple words we toss around daily.
Simultaneously, through the quiz, we try to bring closer the theory and the practice of management.
Typically managers find it difficult to see the link between a big idea written by a famous management guru and their daily work. Yet managers must learn to see and understand this link if they are to cope with change and competition. Investing in oneself is core to regeneration, and regeneration core to escaping the fetters of routine and redundancy. It s not enough to attend conferences and workshops, buy quantities of books where only the first chapter is read, and pay for expensive executive education classes at elite business schools. It s not enough to know jargon, clich s and buzzwords. You need to know how to use them to improve your personal performance. Hopefully this little book by Morgen Witzel will help you in this tricky endeavor.
G ITA P IRAMAL
Editor-in-chief
The Smart Manager
Introduction
H OW SMART A MANAGER ARE YOU?
How well do you understand the art and craft of management?
How smart is your management team when it comes to understanding both the fundamentals of business and new trends?
How good are you at leveraging your knowledge and skills in order to provide value for your business and your customers?
These are the kinds of questions that every thinking manager asks themselves, not just once but often, sometimes even every day. And in times of crisis and change, these questions become even more relevant. Ultimately, those businesses that survive economic crisis, recession and political instability will be the ones whose managers keep their heads, understand the fundamentals, and see change as an opportunity, and not just as a threat.
The companies that survive will be the ones that are managed smart . The managers of these companies will know that being a manager means much more than having an office with a sign on the door; it also means taking charge, taking responsibility, directing and coordinating the efforts of others to meet goals and create value. And this is mental work. Other people may do a lot of their work with their hands, but managers do one hundred per cent of their work with their brains. The only good manager is the smart manager.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK
How to Be Your Own Management Guru is designed to help you answer some of the questions posed above. In the book you will find twenty short essays which discuss issues that are crucial for management in the twenty-first century. Some are related to particular functions like costing, branding and assessment. Some relate to trends such as globalization, or new forms of organization like the virtual organization or the matrix. Others discuss core concepts such as efficiency, innovation, leadership and improvement.
The essays are short and, I hope, readable. Their purpose is to discuss each issue, how and why it came to be important, and what the implications are. Each essay uses examples of companies and managers from around the world-India, Europe, the United States, Japan, China-and some essays dive far back in time to the works of Confucius, Laozi and Kautilya before returning to the present day.
Management is not a new phenomenon; the need to manage effectively has always been with us, for as long as we have had a civilisation. And while culture does play a very important role, the fundamental issues of management are universal and affect every manager, everywhere.
Following each essay there is a short quiz, consisting of a number of sections. You are invited to answer the questions, scoring your answers according to the guidelines provided. The quizzes will test both your own personal understanding of each issue and, more generally, how well your business understands each issue and puts it into practice. Do each quiz as honestly as you can; if there is something you do not know or an area where you feel there is a weakness, let your answers indicate this. (No one else is going to see the answers, after all; this is not an examination and your marks will not be made public.)
It should be stressed that this book does not measure how good a manager you are. It measures how smart a manager you are.
What is the difference? There is a saying in cricket that a bowler is only as good as his or her last delivery. If you bowl five dot balls and then allow the batsman to hit you for a six off the final ball of the over, all the previous effort has been wasted.
So it is in management. Smart managers are those who can deliver consistently. They recognize the circumstances in which they find themselves, know what needs to be done, and do it. They don t waste the last ball; they aim to do everything right, all the time.
Smart managers are not always the most highly skilled and trained. There are plenty of people around who are very good and very skilful managers in one set of circumstances but are not competent in others. People who are very good with numbers and understand the principles of corporate finance might be hopeless at marketing. Operations managers who know their production lines like the back of their hands, and treat their machines like their own children, might be useless with people. (Indeed, this is why Human Resources (HR) departments exist-to provide the people management skills that other managers lack.)
Some people might make good department or team managers but are unable to hold down responsibility at higher levels. The Canadian psychologist Laurence Peter enunciated the famous Peter Principle, which describes how people are promoted to the level of their own incompetence . People who have been highly successful in one part of the business often fail when they are transferred to another business unit. Or think of John Scully, the hugely successful boss of PepsiCo, who failed as chairman of Apple Computers because he could not adapt to the different market and different operating style of the new company.
Smart managers, though, can make these transitions. With the right preparation and training, they can manage anywhere. They succeed in part because they are good at learning quickly, and in part because they are capable of taking a broad overview and understanding the entire business, not just their little patch of it. Smart managers don t get into internal turf wars, or protect their own interests at the expense of those of their colleagues. They understand that a strong business is an organic, integrated whole, and its staff and managers united in pursuit of a common goal.
It is these capabilities and mindsets that this book sets out to measure.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
The book is divided into four sections, each containing five essays and quizzes. The first section, The Mind of the Manager , focuses on thinking about management, rather than just doing it. We begin with leadership-ultimately, doesn t everything begin with leadership?-and go on to discuss core competencies, the long term, continuous improvement, and entrepreneurship. Some readers may be surprised to see entrepreneurship included here: we are sometimes told that entrepreneurship and management are two separate things! After reading the essay, I hope you will agree that they are not.
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