Ready, Steady… Manage

A highly relevant book to read in these cost cutting times. Andrew Wileman evidently having seen it and done it – and now presenting useful advice on the art of cost cutting. Before started reading I noted down what I expected to see advice about: becoming more effective, getting rid of underperforming staff now and [...]

This great little book acts as an introduction and summary to Deming’s ideas: his ‘system of profound knowledge’ the purpose of management removal of numeric targets and incentives the Shewhart Cycle for learning and improvement Variation the Red Bead Game control charts A highly recommended read because …. ( amazon.co.uk | amazon.com )

I promise, I shall make this my last post on CVs and recruitment for a while. (see notes, and more notes) But I just wanted to mention the only useful book I read about CVs when researching the CV book market. When I read this book I gave up on writing a CV book because [...]

So the last post described what I wanted. Now some tips about how I read a CV. So make sure you write your CV to support my reading of it. Contrary to some advice – I don’t really mind how many pages the CV has. I care about the relevancy of the information and that [...]

This post started as notes for a book. “What would be better?” I thought “In this time of recession, than to prey on peoples fears of losing their job and write a book on how to write a CV.” And then I did the research and read through about 15 books on how to write [...]

I have grown more aware of the passage of time over the years. Not just in the sense of growing older, but as a manager my time gets split between multiple foci. As a team member I typically had one or two tasks or priorities. At the end of the day I generally knew what [...]

Subtitled “How to Sell yourself and your brilliant ideas” this dual-authored book has two parts. One for each author. And yes this has made it schizophrenic. The first half by Roger Mavity tells the hard won lessons from a marketeer. The second half by Stephen Bayley reads like a standard book researched management text. I [...]

So, from the title, do you expect a kind of folksy tale of happy families and happy teams? Good, because that describes the book well. The books starts very un-managerially with the birth details of the children and then ties ‘becoming a parent’ in to ‘becoming a manager’. I actually think I would enjoy working [...]

Yet another time management book. This one starts well and by page xi in the introduction I have warmed to the notion of a “zero tolerance workspace”. But then we hit an “analysis” phase and we learn…nothing for a while. I suppose this section tries to build up the belief set that we need to [...]

Most management books offer some platitudes, have 2 or 3 useful sentences and then lots of padding. “The First 90 Days” offers a real exception I will not pretend to summarise all the useful information in this book for this book review. But I hope to whet your appetite so that you go out, buy [...]