For God's Sake: Work by the Book!

Management Explained from Within

Sarah Zohn

• Publisher: WS PROFESSIONAL
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9789813222502
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

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Most managers today work solely on intuition rather than best practices plus intuition. People keep reinventing what it means to be a manager, instead of learning from others' experience and improving on it. People these days are not less talented; they have access to more information and they are fast learners. The problem is that there aren't enough places to learn from, as organizations — large and small — are so mercurial and unstable.

This book summarizes the author's experience from two major sources: a) growing with different companies through all the management ranks up to Vice President in a mega US corporation in the computer industry, and b) from working as a consultant to dozens of companies and hundreds of managers from different backgrounds and industries. New and experienced managers will benefit from principles, approaches, and checklists for current managerial challenges.

The book covers a broad range of managerial challenges — from role definition to strategy to communication.

--> Contents:

• A Manager's Cookbook
• The Manager's Job
• Setting and Achieving Goals
• Global Company Strategy
• Communication Technocrat
• B2B Marketing Basics
• Sales Organization Basics for B2B
• Organizations: Culture, Structure, and People
• Friend of Numbers
• Turning the Curve with Sprezzatura

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--> Readership: Managers and leaders of small and medium companies and mid-level management of large companies; general public interested in managerial leadership. -->
Keywords:Management; Experience; Leadership; Manager; Leader; Operational Strategy; Strategy; Execution; Work Management; People Management; Business Ecosystem; Setting Goals; Achieving Goals; Achievement; Business in Numbers; Sprezzatura; Organizations; Principles in Management; Marketing Basics; Sales Basics; Critical Mass; Sunk Cost Review:0

PART I

A Manager’s Cookbook

1

The Cook

All my friends are aware that I love to cook; so much so that it has become one of my distinguishing features. During cocktail hour of a conference I once attended with hundreds of business people, an executive — a colleague — introduced me to his acquaintances. As you’d expect, they were standing in a circle holding their wine glasses, engaged in small talk. With some apprehension — as I’m not so great at these events — I slowly walked over, expecting to be presented to these people with my short bio — highlights, title, and a cute anecdote to garnish our new acquaintance. What he chose to do, however, was utterly different. I want you to meet my colleague and friend, he addressed them, you must know, she is such a great cook! I knew then and there that indulging my friends with great dinners is far more impressive than any of my career accomplishments.

My annual dinner is a social event for my close friends, and for me it is an adventure in creativity — cooking the meal and putting on the event. These dinners are 6-hours of food samplings and togetherness. A couple of months in advance I set the date and start thinking of the theme for the dinner. I like to tell a story through my choice of theme — usually the experience of a recent trip. I choose around 20 dishes from the typical cuisines of the latest parts of the world where I traveled, such as Tlayuda from a Tianguis in Oaxaca, Tapado soup from a riverside home in Livingston Guatemala accompanied by coconut challah bread from the same kitchen, and Secreto cutlets served with rich Mojo Picante from a plancha in the ­Canaries — yes, they are all served in their refined gourmet versions.

I need to be very careful in selecting the menu for such a long eating event; especially since every dish is accompanied by its matching wine — it has to be light, well balanced, and small, always leaving a taste for more.

I always was very serious about cooking. The French kitchen was my first love. The old French food was exotic, refined, and beyond the grasp of our diaspora-influenced tastes; the dishes left my guests delighted. My first French cookbook, however, was a challenge. In the beginning, whenever a photo seduced me, the recipe had so many steps and unfamiliar terms that I had to shelve it for some time. I didn’t fail to produce; rather, I did not make it as a goal to accomplish. Since then, I have mastered the secrets of the French kitchen, but now I have this yearning toward Japanese, which is so delightful and tantalizing on the table, and still unapproachable in the kitchen. At least for me!

In a continuous quest to improve my techniques and delight my friends with surprises, just like Siddhartha’s journey toward nirvana, I met my master and mentor somewhere along the way — the Donna Hay magazine. Australia’s gift to its western cousins is unjustifiably hardly known outside Down Under. This magazine is so meaningful to me that I prefer to humanize it — we have a relationship. And I continue to be in awe of how much more I can learn from her, like from any good old master. Bite by bite, she augments my vocabulary, enriches the palette of flavors, and with her masterful wisdom she teaches me all the possible shortcuts.

Finally, I found a concise and clear source of variety with global reach, and oh so doable! Now, I can wait much more peacefully for my endless dinners of shock and awe.

In all those years of cooking, I’ve learned one important lesson for life: great cooking is a craft that grows with experience — not an art.

2

The Manager

Management and leadership are also forms of craft — with tools, ­methods, ingredients, and techniques that have to be mastered until they are second nature, just as in cooking.

Let’s review a wonderful example from The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, a prominent surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School. In his book, he offers expertise on how to reduce errors, improve safety, and increase efficiency in surgery — certainly a noble cause — and a story that has direct application to many organizations and fields. The story is simple. During his tenure as Massachusetts General Surgeon, research showed that about 6% of patients in surgery wards of hospitals developed infections and that the general conditions of these hospitals did not have any effect on this unbecoming statistic. In fact, hospitals in affluent Boston ranked in this research similar to those in India. According to Gawande, the main causal chain was as follows: the surgical environment engenders so much pressure on the medical staff that they make errors in following protective procedures, which in turn leaves the door open for microbes to enter and infect. Clearly, this problem occurred due to the failure of the entire system and not just a failed task.

His approach to solving this systemic problem appears to be very simple; yet, after studying other fields, he proved that using it in his own field is highly effective. A simple checklist, if enforced continually, can reduce human error and reverse the hospital infections trend. In his quest to create proper checklists, he found that designing the right checklist was not, however, a simple task; it required special skills and experience — the craft of creating checklists.

Gawande writes that despite these checklists providing an obvious and easy-to-prove positive effect, his major challenge was to overcome the resistance to checklists coming from surgeons. They, the most prominent and confident professionals in a hospital’s hierarchy, had a hard time submitting to simple checklists despite the overwhelming evidence of their effectiveness. Conversely, members of the support staff, such as nurses, were far more open to this idea.

Similarly, in my practice, I usually find that managers and leaders are confident that their current toolbox and experience is sufficient for most tasks in their area of responsibility. After all, the fact that they hold the important positions in a group, a unit, a department, or a business is already enough reason for self-assurance. However, after being in quite a few management and executive positions, I know that underneath this confidence lies a great deal of insecurity — the higher the position, the more lonely and insecure one feels. On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with a small dose of paranoia to keep things in balance — I’m certainly not the first to advocate this. On the other hand, I believe that it is important to test this pervasive level of ostensible confidence.

In interviews with managers, I find that they feel confident about being able to execute at least 80% of their responsibilities in effective and efficient ways. It appears that they have a tolerance for up to 20% of their work being less defined or in need of revamp. Most managers who have been in their position for some time feel that they have already achieved this 80/20 state — 80% under control and 20% less so.

Here is where I like to challenge this view. I find that businesses and work environments are changing at a quick pace. Andy Grove, the legendary chairman of Intel Corporation, said, “leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster.” He said this years ago, but it’s even more relevant today. We see continuous shifts in competitive landscapes and in investors’ demands and expectations. Shortages in skilled labor are prevalent. Many companies don’t even have fully settled product portfolios or boundaries — product definitions and addressable markets are not constant, not to mention new technologies that make not-so-old ones obsolete at an ever-increasing pace. Managers, especially at middle and lower ranks, are very good at executing tasks, but in these constantly shifting conditions, company structures and management roles are so unstable that they don’t achieve their units’ best possible contributions to the business. The portion that seems to be under control — 80% of the manager’s responsibilities — is in dire need of reevaluation in many cases that I have reviewed. All aspects of a manager’s responsibilities — workload, priorities, human resources, and internal and cross-functional processes — should be assessed and corrected at all levels, periodically and not just once.

Why is it, then, that despite hiring educated, experienced, and ­success-driven people for management positions, we don’t see optimal management in the organization? This problem is pervasive and well recognized — executives often report on the shortcomings and sub-par performance of their lower management ranks, while conveniently refraining from much self-assessment.

Most of the resumes I review clearly show that people change positions faster than before, whether within their companies or by moving to other companies. Managers who excel in one aspect of their role that’s critical to another area of the business are likely to be promoted on a whim without consideration for the entire set of requirements of the new role. A single successful project is often followed by a premature promotion of the “hero” of the project to a higher management position. Looking from top-down, these decision...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Praises for the Book
• Contents
• Foreword
• PART I A Manager’s Cookbook
• PART II The Manager’s Job
• PART III Setting and Achieving Goals
• PART IV Global Company Strategy
• PART V Communication Technocrat
• PART VI B2B Marketing Basics
• PART VII Sales Organization Basics for B2B
• PART VIII Organizations: Culture, Structure, and People
• PART IX Friend of Numbers
• PART X Turning the Curve with Sprezzatura
• Index