‘What Management Is: How it works and why it's everyone's business’ is filled with fascinating concepts and key takeaways. A few of them are listed below:
- Management’s real genius is turning complexity and specialization into performance
- Simple numbers help us to face reality and make sense of events in ways that our intuition cannot do alone
- The greatest obstacle to innovation in organizations is the unwillingness to let go of yesterday’s success and to free up resources that no longer contribute to results.
Most management books preach a single formula or a single fad. However, this one roams freely among the best thoughts and has been written with a practical eye for what matters in real organizations.
Some Great Quotes from The Book:
- “Management's first mission is value creation.”
- “A consumer sees prices as a measure of value. A manager sees them as power relationships.”
- “As manufactured products have become increasingly commodity-like and therefore less valuable to customers, GE has not been alone in discovering that often more money can be made from the services related to a product.”
- “From the outside, a business can look like a seemingly mindless game of chance at which any donkey could win, provided only that he be ruthless. But that is of course how any human activity looks to the outsider unless it can be shown to be purposeful, organized, systematic; that is unless it can be presented as the generalized knowledge of a discipline.”
- “Companies should teach managers to keep the company's purpose in mind. Ford's purpose was to make cars available to the masses, not to make the most profit per car.”
- “Quantifying things helps management make sense of larger happenings. Making sense of numbers is the hard part, not crunching them.”
- “Thinking outside the box is a cliché, but it is important.”
Whether you are a fresher or an experienced executive, this book will give you a firm grasp on what it takes to make an organization perform. You can think of this book as everything you wanted to know about management but were afraid to ask. It is a comprehensive exploration of the overall process rather than a traditional how-to-do.
Rarely has anyone so succinctly and engagingly presented the core principles of management in a single book. It is a terrific read for anyone trying to find their way out of managerial issues.