The Manager's Handbook [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Good managers are not born, they are made. They are fashioned by experience of business and the realities of the workplace. They grow in stature and managerial skill largely from their encounters with people and problems, not from studying the notes and theories catalogued in textbooks. The Manager's Handbook is different. Rather than explaining the theory of management, it describes real life from the manager's point of view. In doing this it offers a uniquely illustrated, practical and concrete guide to conducting your business life more positively and to becoming a better manager. Business life, and the job of the manager within it, have an apparent complexity but an inherent simplicity. The Manager's Handbook cuts through the complexity and lays bare the simplicity with checklists, guidelines, diagrams and charts. It was once believed that all you had to learn to become a manager was how to organize, coordinate, command and control. It is now widely accepted that this systems view is simplistic. The target keeps moving; events and people do not always conform long enough to be planned and controlled. The ways and means of management, therefore, involve continual experimentation with new approaches to old and new problems. Remember the maxim: 'Try it, fix it, do it.' You will grow and learn and be a better manager by observing, practising. thinking and rethinking, experimenting and continually questioning. Worthwhile answers will come from the heat of the action, from dealing with the course of real business events as well as from the problems and personalities of those involved in them. Management is about people not systems; people coming together to achieve the clear objectives of their organization. In a very real way you have a contract with yoxir organization: everyday you give something of your life and receive something in return, not only a meal ticket but a genuine chance to achieve. At the end of the day, you and your subordinates should derive some meaning which reinforces and reaffirms your own values. This book gives some essential guidelines to help you achieve this difficult aim. The modern, practical approach of The Manager's Handbook means that it contains something useful for managers at all levels. But it is those in their early years of management who are intended as its primary audience. We recommend that, first, you observe business reality and then take the book, dip into it, and compare what you find with what you have perceived in the workplace. The reality should measure up to the way in which the book was conceived, written and illustrated - a distillation of the experience of a broad spectrum of Arthur Young consultants and practising managers. JOHN O. R. DARBY CHAIRMAN ARTHUR YOUNG 7