Ask a Manager
Ask a Manager

Author: Alison Green

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0399181822

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From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together

The Peter Principle
The Peter Principle

Author: Dr. Laurence J. Peter

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2014-04-01

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 0062359495

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The classic #1 New York Times bestseller that answers the age-old question Why is incompetence so maddeningly rampant and so vexingly triumphant? The Peter Principle, the eponymous law Dr. Laurence J. Peter coined, explains that everyone in a hierarchy—from the office intern to the CEO, from the low-level civil servant to a nation’s president—will inevitably rise to his or her level of incompetence. Dr. Peter explains why incompetence is at the root of everything we endeavor to do—why schools bestow ignorance, why governments condone anarchy, why courts dispense injustice, why prosperity causes unhappiness, and why utopian plans never generate utopias. With the wit of Mark Twain, the psychological acuity of Sigmund Freud, and the theoretical impact of Isaac Newton, Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull’s The Peter Principle brilliantly explains how incompetence and its accompanying symptoms, syndromes, and remedies define the world and the work we do in it.

Senior Leadership Teams
Senior Leadership Teams

Author: Ruth Wageman

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 2008-01-24

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1633692043

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An organization’s fate hinges on its CEO—right? Not according to the authors of Senior Leadership Teams. They argue that in today's world of neck-snapping change, demands on leaders in top roles are rapidly outdistancing the capabilities of any one person - no matter how talented. Result? Chief executives are turning to their enterprise's senior leaders for help. Yet many CEOs stumble when creating a leadership team. One major challenge is that senior executives often focus more on their individual roles than on the top team's shared work. Without the CEO's careful attention to setting the team up correctly, these high-powered managers often have difficulty pulling together to move their organization forward. Sometimes they don't even agree about what constitutes the right path forward. The authors explain how to determine whether your organization needs a senior leadership team. Then, drawing on their study of 100+ top teams from around the world, they explain how to create a clear and compelling purpose for your team, get the right people on it, provide structure and support, and sharpen team members' competencies - and your own. Timely and practical, this book enables you to create and sustain a leadership team whose members learn from one another while collaborating to pursue your company's objectives.

The Art of Action
The Art of Action

Author: Stephen Bungay

Publisher: Nicholas Brealey

Published: 2011-02-16

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1473644968

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What do you want me to do? This question is the enduring management issue, a perennial problem that Stephen Bungay shows has an old solution that is counter-intuitive and yet common sense. The Art of Action is a thought-provoking and fresh look at how managers can turn planning into execution, and execution into results. Drawing on his experience as a consultant, senior manager and a highly respected military historian, Stephen Bungay takes a close look at the nineteenth-century Prussian Army, which built its agility on the initiative of its highly empowered junior officers, to show business leaders how they can build more effective, productive organizations. Based on a theoretical framework which has been tested in practice over 150 years, Bungay shows how the approach known as 'mission command' has been applied in businesses as diverse as pharmaceuticals and F1 racing today. The Art of Action is scholarly but engaging, rigorous but pragmatic, and shows how common sense can sometimes be surprising.

The Enthusiastic Employee
The Enthusiastic Employee

Author: David Sirota

Publisher: Pearson Education

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0133249026

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This book is about employee enthusiasm: that special, invigorating, purposeful and emotional state that's always present in the most successful organizations. Most people are enthusiastic when they're hired: hopeful, ready to work hard, eager to contribute. What happens? Management, that's what. The Enthusiastic Employee is an action-oriented book that helps companies obtain more from workers - the basic premise is that under the right kind of leadership, the more one side wins in a collaborative relationship, the more for the other side. The book is heavily evidence-based (using extensive employee survey data) and lays out two basic ideas: the "Three-Factor Theory" of human motivation at work and the "Partnership" company culture that is based on the Three-Factor Theory and that, by far, brings out the best in people as they respond with enthusiasm about what they do and the company they do it for. Drawing on research with 13,000,000+ employees in 840+ companies, The Enthusiastic Employee, Second Edition tells you what managers (from first-line supervisor to senior leadership) do wrong. Then it tells you something much more important: what to do instead. David Sirota and Douglas Klein detail exactly how to create an environment where enthusiasm flourishes and businesses excel. Extensively updated with new research, case studies, and techniques (they have added over 8.6 million employees and over 400 companies to their analyses ), it now contains a detailed study of Mayo Clinic, one of the world's most effective healthcare organizations and a true representation of the principle of partnership, as well as more in-depth descriptions of private sector exemplars of partnership, such as Costco. Other new chapters include: how the Great Recession really impacted workers' morale (bottom-line, it didn't) and how to build a true Partnership Culture that starts with senior leadership. They now debunk fashionable theories of worker "generations" (Baby Boomers, Gen X, Y, etc.) as mostly nonsense... clarify what they've learned about making business ethics and corporate social responsibility actionable... share what research on merit pay (pay for individual performance) tells us about its likely impact on school teachers and performance (not good)...discuss the utility of teleworking (and the dust-up at Yahoo)...offer compelling, data-informed insights about women and minorities in the workplace, and much more. You can have enthusiastic employees, and it does matter - more than it ever has. Whether you're a business leader, HR/talent management professional, or strategist, that's the workforce you need - and this is the book that will help you get it.