This book is based on a mix of experience and observations of effective managers. It’s popular on Smashwords for “full and sample downloads” so I thought I’d add something here.
This is the intro:
THE GOOD MANAGER
This book isn’t about euphemisms. Management culture is a joke, and a bad one. It’s overloaded with brain dead rituals, blue sky bullshit, and driveling idiots making a career out of being driveling idiots.
Anyone staying on the big management cruise liner will find that it’s already sunk, and that learning how to do your own swimming is a very good idea. The present management culture has a shelf life of exactly the time it takes to replace it with something more cost effective.
Given the present culture, that could be the time it takes to find a canary that can wear a tie and chair meetings where absolutely nothing is ever achieved. The present version of management culture is an endangered species, and with good reason.
The Good Manager really is a class act.
Not a parrot, not a simple minded option-fondler, and not a conceited, middle aged, middle class slut with a high opinion of himself.
That’s also why nobody’s being held up as an example in this book, because every loser and his Executive Gerbil would instantly dogmatize the ideas, and fossilize the examples, which is another besetting sin of management culture. Any living culture is fluid, and dogmatism achieves the exact opposite.
We’ve already had enough examples of the Peter Principle, Parkinson’s Law and How We All Misread Victor Kiam. Analyzing success and failure only goes so far, and nobody needs another book agreeing with everybody else. Making a career out of mediocrity may be profitable, but it’s still mediocrity.
This is about managers with actual talent, actual ideas, and real objectivity.
Sorry.
Nor is there any obvious need for more fawning books about “success stories”. The successful people didn’t hang around waiting to be successful by someone else’s benchmarks. Talented people don’t need much more than a general direction, not a road map with Diners of Interest and Motels of Renown.
The hallmark of great managers is originality. They’re not just managers, they’re the business engine and the power plant, and the think tank.
They’re also not psychotic tyrants. Tantrums are for babies and jerks. The tyrant is usually an obsessive idiot, and tyrants don’t last too long.
The Good Manager is a real person, not a collection of vegetative collegiate exercises, infantile personality and lousy acting.
The individuality is a primary force, and it moves whole mountain ranges, when it feels like it. Far from being overawed by the status and talent of others, the individualism often sets the standards.
There is no inferiority complex, no deep psychic flaw which somehow gets resolved by being CEO of a global corporation.
The Good Manager is a real top dog, and a talented one, not something from Rent a Cliché.
(Exactly where the cookie cutter management role came from, I don’t know, probably media imagery, but it should go to hell, and soon.)
If you hire the Good Manager, you’re looking for the kind of talent that nobody else quite understands, which achieves things nobody else considered possible, if they even thought of them.
If you’re not looking for that, and you hire it, you’re going to get it. Good Managers are always at the front of the front, and they’re already looking at problems other people don’t even know exist yet. Experts ask them for advice, at least half the time.
Like the Virtuous Man of Chinese philosophy, The Good Manager has style, but not oppressively so. This is a civilized person. There’s no need to play status games or pecking order rituals, which are considered, rightly, to be pointless and demeaning, as well as chronic wastes of time.
The defining characteristic is intelligence. The Good Manager may or may not have a PhD, but in five minutes you’ll be well aware there’d be no great difficulty getting one if required. So read on, and you’ll at least find an interesting person.