Ready, Steady… Manage

I have a problem with many business and management books. so many of them seem to have one idea, or 10 ideas strung out for 250 pages with lots of boring stories and examples, or worse – written in parable form. I really just want to get to the meat and substance of the book. [...]

People tend to meet expectations, their own, and those of the people who they have a relationship with. I assume most people have encountered, even if 2nd hand, “Pygmalion In The Classroom” – the 1968 study of kids and teachers expectations. I see no reason why the same dynamic does not work in business.

So a cash-in on the ever popular “Dragon’s Den” BBC programme – at least popular in my house. Is it too much to hope for some good well spun and hard earned business lessons from reading the book? well…. amazon.co.uk amazon.com

Subtitled “How to Transform Chaos and Conflict”, and further subtitled “Strategies from The Art of War”. Which one of these attracts you to the book most? We could derive some sort of psychoanalytical analysis from that choice, or we could just class it as clever marketing – targeting the management book crowd, the self-help crowd [...]

Subtitled “Secrets of Great Management” this book has a condensed set of wisdom to spout to us. I dislike the fictional “Sam the Manager” approach – but so much good advice lies in here that I found it a useful read. [amazon.co.uk] [amazon.com]

Aimed at the “manager of a small workgroup faced with a wide range of responsibilities.” Hey, that describes my job! So does the book have useful words of advice? Indeed it does… [amazon.co.uk] [amazon.com]

My son and I played with with his train set a couple of days ago. We had made “an accident track” – a perilous system of curves and hills where trains regularly fall off. Now if he only had one or two trains then they would have enough space between them, and no accidents would [...]

ChangeThis.com acts as a monthly source for ‘new’ ideas. I subscribed to their bulletin so every month I get an email reminder detailing the new manifestos that ChangeThis have selected for e-publication. They also provide an rss feed to keep you up to date with the manifesto publications. 5 Recent Manifestos that caught my eye [...]

Much of this book dishes out information that I already knew and I found myself rushing through it to find things I didn’t. And eventually the book did dish out some things I didn’t know. I also found that someone else had already implemented some product ideas I had planned to follow up on, so [...]

If you do not already subscribe to John Seddon‘s Vanguard Newsletter then you simply must. John Seddon authored the books "Freedom from Command and Control" and "I want you to cheat" both of which I will write reviews for at a later date. Both of which I recommend as essential to help you think about [...]