Ready, Steady… Manage

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 this book and feast ravenously upon it.

I guess I relate to it so much because I have moved from site to site and job to job so often – mainly as a consultant, or contractor, but latterly as a full time employee. I have experienced a lot of transitions, and I know how hard those first 90 days can seem. Lessons I learned on my own:

• track your successes – otherwise you’ll look back and wonder what happened (it all moves so fast)
• set expectations early with your boss (particularly on how you can evaluate success together)
• evaluate your team quickly and don’t shirk the hard early decisions

Michael Watkins covers all this and more. And I wish I had read this before.

[amazon.co.uk] [amazon.com]

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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.

I spent a long time improving my reading speed, and yet I still want to find ways of cramming more valuable information into my skull more quickly and more easily. So I started to look for ways to outsource my reading – at least partially. I found various book summary sites. My initial thoughts were this would be a way of whittling out the dross of business books more easily and identifying the books that I really want to read.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to find them useful or if I was going to end up signing away some money for a pile of badly written essays.

But I decided to sign up as an experiment anyway.

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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.

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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….

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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 and the Sun Tzu crowd.

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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.

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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…

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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 occur. But he put on lots of trains, and they travelled at different speeds because of variations in battery power, and so we saw accidents. Lots of accidents.

And I found myself saying “Keep the trains running”. A phrase that I have heard from numerous CEOs in companies that I have worked at. A phrase which I had always thought of as management padding when a more honest “we have made changes, you will not find them easy, you have not felt the full impact of all these changes yet, so we expect you to keep doing your job despite the change”. Or a more cynical “look, just make the changes work and quit moaning, cover up our mistakes”.

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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 included:

• The Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness
• The New Time Management: Simply Focus on the Fundamentals, and Toss Away the Tips
• The 10 1/2 Commandments of Visual Thinking: The “Lost Chapter” from The Back of the Napkin
• Marketing Mismatch: When New Won’t Work With Old (Riffs on Meatball Sundae)
• Drawings that Will Change Your Life

I make a point of reading these manifestos when they come through. The manifestos usually exhibit a high standard of writing and even if you disagree – the short manifesto format does not tie up your time unduly.

A recommended rss feed or newsletter to sign up for.

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 I saved myself some development and research time.

So will you find the book worth spending any time on?

[amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]

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