What Is A Manager? [antikvár]

PreliminariesThere's got to be a reason for adding to the mountain of books about management. Several reasons in fact.One reason: despite that mountain, there's still a shortage of books that deal with the guts of the management job. Most of them take a particular angle usually business management, sometimes public administration, and then there's a further narrowing of the target area to production or marketing or finance or office management or whatever. This makes them a bit too specialised for anyone who's looking for the basic essentials of what management itself is about (as opposed to other sorts of occupation), what a manager does, the way he thinks, the kind of skills and habits he needs to develop as a 'good manager'.Another reason: the books that do take the broad view are mostly fairly sophisticated. They're written, consciously or unconsciously, for the middle to upper levels of the management spectrum. But the mass of people in management jobs are at the lower levels of the spectrum, and they find it a bit difficult to translate the concepts they're offered into practical ideas they can actually use in their own jobs. Judging by the things that go on inside many organisations, even people at higher levels find it difficult too.Yet another reason: a lot of the stuff really is heavy reading. From the authors' point of view this must limit their market. More seriously, from the potential readers' point of view it cuts them off from a wealth of good advice. Most people just won't read stuff they find difficult and dull.So what we're trying to do in this book and the others in the series is to put together a view of management that is coherent, that makes practical sense, and that is easy to assimilate. If in the process we touch some sensitive nerves among the management ranks, so much the better. Too much so-called 'management thinking' is woolly, conventional and complacent. Perhaps that's why there is so much bad management about.One practical problem we've had is to do with sex. That's not what you might be thinking. It's simply that a lot of