John Adair - John Adairs 100 Greatest Ideas for Being a Brilliant Manager

Preface

Welcome to this book. The 100 Ideas it contains revolve around your role and responsibilities as a manager.

This isnt a textbook, its an informal conversation between you and me about the subject of our mutual interests. All I have done is to break down the proverbial elephant into a hundred bites. Therefore you should feel free to start where you like and then follow your own course of interest through the book as and when you have the time to dip into it.

Like the late Peter Drucker, I think that the first question managers have to ask themselves is: What am I being paid to do? By the end of this book you will, I trust, know the answer to that question.

Our whole understanding of management is undergoing a slow revolution following the great discovery of the generic role of leader in the 1960s. There is now a growing recognition that managership is one form one among many of leadership . Leadership doesnt begin and end with the CEO and their fellow directors. Managers are leaders at different organizational levels. All of your employees are leaders in their own way. That makes you into a leader of leaders.

For that reason, although this book is about being a brilliant manager , youll find I often use the term leader rather than the narrower term manager . If you manage people, you are a leader. You may not think of yourself in that way right now, but after reading this book, you will be in no doubt. For greater and deeper insight into leadership itself, look out a copy of my 100 Greatest Ideas for Effective Leadership .

There is a universal body of knowledge about the generic role of leader that I shall share with you in this book. But there are at least four other areas of generic knowledge in the human side of enterprise that I shall introduce you to although not treat exhaustively in these pages. Again, you will find those in greater depth in other titles in this series.

Imagine that, as a manager, you have now moved into a cul-de-sac called Management Close. Your house is called Business Leadership and it is No. 3. Here is the street plan and a list of your new neighbours.

Over time in this book you can visit your five neighbours houses and learn all you can from their inhabitants.

There are also other nearby streets you will need to explore: for example, Information Technology, Financial Skills, Sales and Marketing, Production, Negotiating and Employment Law.

The reason you should invest time in getting to know your new neighbours is that managership is primarily about people , not things, numbers or money, as important as all three of these are. If you get the people dimension right, things and numbers and money have a way of sorting themselves out. You wont be disappointed.