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 quickly,
driving out […]

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 it demonstrates […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]