Table of Contents
To Michelle, Toby, Camille, Renata, and the thousands of Soundview subscribers
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although my name appears on the cover of this remarkable management book, there are many other people behind the scenes who also deserve credit for making The Management Gurus possible.
First, special appreciation needs to be given to Soundview Executive Book Summaries chairman George Y. Clement, the man who interviewed and hired me as a writer and editor more than seven years ago. Guided by his vision and the leadership of Soundviews president Josh Clement and publisher Rebecca Clement, the company has evolved from a publisher of book summaries to a world-class multimedia resource for executives and businesspeople around the globe. Sincere thanks go to the Clements for creating the fertile foundation from which this book grew.
Soundviews Sabrina Hickman must also be given thanks for her outstanding work with the publishers of the books summarized in The Management Gurus. Without her ceaseless efforts, the book you are now reading would not exist. Thanks also go to Soundviews senior graphic designer, Christine Wright, for her valuable artistic input.
I would also like to give a personal thank-you to Jillian Gray at Penguin for her outstanding work throughout the writing and editing of this book. Working with the professionals at Penguin Portfolio, including Adrian Zackheim, Adrienne Schultz, and Courtney Nobile, has been both a pleasure and a rewarding learning experience.
And finally, a sincere thank-you goes to each of the publishers who allowed the words and works of their authors to be featured in The Management Gurus, including the helpful people at Wharton School Publishing, Jossey-Bass, AMACOM, Penguin Group, Portfolio, Hyperion, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, and Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Soundview Executive Book Summaries publishes 8-page print and 20-minute audio summaries of top business books, available by subscription. Summaries are available in print, audio CD, CD-ROM, and online formats at www.summary.com.
INTRODUCTION
Soundview Executive Book Summaries has provided busy readers with summaries of exceptional business books for nearly thirty years. In 2006 we published our first full-length book, The Marketing Gurus, a collection of summaries from some of the most interesting and influential writings on marketing. Now, within the pages of The Management Gurus, we offer you fifteen summaries containing valuable lessons on people, management, and change.
The authors who appear in this book grasp managements fluid concepts and transform them into concrete actions that managers can take into the workplace. The discipline of management changes every day as organizations evolve in a marketplace that continues its eternal metamorphosis. Using the advice, strategies, tips, and techniques found in the following pages, managers and leaders can make better decisions while helping their organizations compete in that marketplace.
The juxtaposition of the management ideas in this volume creates a thought-provoking tool for managers and other students of management theory, starting with advice and insights from world-class leaders and managers. Best-selling author John C. Maxwell presents a compendium of twenty-five straightforward people principles for leadership and life in Winning with People. In Topgrading, management psychologist and consultant Dr. Bradford D. Smart shows executives and managers how the best organizations hire, coach, and promote their people to A-Player status.
In Jack Welch and the 4Es of Leadership, author Jeffrey A. Krames draws on the leadership model Welch used successfully at GE and describes how some of the best managers have created industry-changing profitability for their companies.
The leadership lessons executive educators James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner offer within The Leadership Challenge help aspiring leaders become managers and executives while also helping those already in leadership positions use 360-degree feedback and a variety of other useful tools and techniques.
The next five summaries present vital insights into the more personal facets of leadership, including the self-discovery that is required to successfully accomplish the difficult work of a leader. Charles Handy begins his classic Gods of Management by explaining that he wrote the book to help more people understand the ways individuals and organizations work so they can better face the changing times.
Management researchers and trainers Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler also aim to help individuals cope with change in Influencer, raising the art and science of management above factory floors, cubicles, and boardrooms to the places they live and play. In True North, legendary former Medtronic CEO Bill George and co-author Peter Sims describe the ways leaders develop their skills for personal introspection that increase self-awareness. Executive coach extraordinaire Marshall Goldsmith and co-author Mark Reiter offer leaders similar introspection techniques and guidance on the path to better leadership in What Got You Here Wont Get You There. The authors describe valuable practices that can help managers and executives solidify their beliefs and use this knowledge to improve their leadership behavior.
In Judgment, two top leadership experts combine their innovative ideas to show leaders how to develop the ability to make better decisions in their work. Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis offer the decision-making skills and wisdom they have gained over their remarkable careers as best-selling authors and respected advisers to some of the most powerful CEOs and leaders around the world.
The next four summaries reveal the secrets to developing world-class organizations on your own terms. Bo Burlingham delivers a unique and important message while focusing on a specific type of company: small giants. In Small Giants, Burlingham shows how several small companies rejected growth for growths sake and, instead, dedicated themselves to the strategy of becoming the best at what they do.
To make decisions such as this, a leader must understand his or her companys role in its market ecosystem. Best-selling author Geoffrey A. Moores Dealing with Darwin helps managers do this by turning a monumental management analysis of Cisco Systems into a groundbreaking unified theory on the evolution of markets that continues to help companies prevent extinction.
As the Internet revolution has matured, the market ecosystem has expanded to include new tools and techniques that help the practice of management move forward by leaps and bounds. In Wikinomics, management experts Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams outline the techniques used by the best companies to tap the power of new technology, global interconnectivity, and mass collaboration. Tapscott and Williams imagine a brighter future for management, filled with previously unimagined possibilities for better communication and teamwork.
Next comes Managing Crises Before They Happen, where crisis-management experts Ian I. Mitroff and Gus Anagnos offer strategic lessons about one specific aspect of managing an organization: dealing with crises. Since most managers can expect to face at least one calamity during their careers, the authors show them how to plan for and survive catastrophes.
