Book: Management Challenges for the 21st Century

Management Challenges for the 21st Century
by Peter F. Drucker

In his 31st work, esteemed sociologist Drucker follows his last major management work, Post-Capitalist Society (LJ 2/15/93), with his ideas on how the concept of management is changing, focusing on the major critical issues, problems, practices, and strategies management faces in the new century. Instead of offering a futurist set of predictions, Drucker discusses major challenges facing management that are already manifest in todays rapidly changing world. In a sweeping macro-level analysis of social, economic, and demographic changes at work across the globe, Drucker outlines the changing role of management, the new realities of strategy, how to lead in times of great change, how to develop new information sources for effective decision-making, and how individual workers must assume responsibility for managing their own careers. With his trademark keen insight and his ability to see connections among disparate forces, this visionary thinker has again produced an essential book for all libraries, especially academic collections.Dale F. Farris, Groves, TX

Unlocking Innovation - Innovation Convergence 2005

CASE STUDY
Innovation Journey: Cargill’s Framework for Innovation Promotion

Dr. Vicki Hargrove, Sr. Consultant &

Michael Dockham, Business Application Technologies Manager, Cargill, Inc

Marketing Leadership Council

Marketing Leadership Council

ITAC: IT Architect Certification Program

ITAC: IT Architect Certification Program

ITAC Conformance Requirements

Book: Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
by Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras

This analysis of what makes great companies great has been hailed everywhere as an instant classic and one of the best business titles since In Search of Excellence. The authors, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, spent six years in research, and they freely admit that their own preconceptions about business success were devastated by their actual findings--along with the preconceptions of virtually everyone else.

Built to Last identifies 18 "visionary" companies and sets out to determine what's special about them. To get on the list, a company had to be world famous, have a stellar brand image, and be at least 50 years old. We're talking about companies that even a layperson knows to be, well, different: the Disneys, the Wal-Marts, the Mercks.

Whatever the key to the success of these companies, the key to the success of this book is that the authors don't waste time comparing them to business failures. Instead, they use a control group of "successful-but-second-rank" companies to highlight what's special about their 18 "visionary" picks. Thus Disney is compared to Columbia Pictures, Ford to GM, Hewlett Packard to Texas Instruments, and so on.

The core myth, according to the authors, is that visionary companies must start with a great product and be pushed into the future by charismatic leaders. There are examples of that pattern, they admit: Johnson & Johnson, for one. But there are also just too many counterexamples--in fact, the majority of the "visionary" companies, including giants like 3M, Sony, and TI, don't fit the model. They were characterized by total lack of an initial business plan or key idea and by remarkably self-effacing leaders. Collins and Porras are much more impressed with something else they shared: an almost cult-like devotion to a "core ideology" or identity, and active indoctrination of employees into "ideologically commitment" to the company.

The comparison with the business "B"-team does tend to raise a significant methodological problem: which companies are to be counted as "visionary" in the first place? There's an air of circularity here, as if you achieve "visionary" status by ... achieving visionary status. So many roads lead to Rome that the book is less practical than it might appear. But that's exactly the point of an eloquent chapter on 3M. This wildly successful company had no master plan, little structure, and no prima donnas. Instead it had an atmosphere in which bright people were both keen to see the company succeed and unafraid to "try a lot of stuff and keep what works." --Richard Farr

Book: The Practice of Management

The Practice of Management
by Peter F. Drucker

A must read for any manager.

Book: The Power of Full Engagement : Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

The Power of Full Engagement : Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal
by Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz

The authors, founders of and executives at LGE Performance Systems, an executive training program based on athletic coaching programs, offer a program aimed at stressed individuals who want to find more purpose in their work and ways to better handle their overburdened relationships. Just as athletes train, play and then recover, people need to recognize their own energy levels. "Balancing stress and recovery is critical not just in competitive sports, but also in managing energy in all facets of our lives. Emotional depth and resilience depend on active engagement with others and with our own feelings." Case studies demonstrate how some modest changes can have an immediate impact. Loehr (Mental Toughness Training for Sports) and Schwartz (Art of the Deal, writing with Donald Trump) also include a chart highlighting Action Steps, Targeted Muscle, Desired Outcome and Performance Barrier and apply these tenets to individual cases. A chart analyzing the benefits and costs to taking certain action shows the impact negative behavior can have on both physical and mental well-being. However, the actual "training program" whereby readers can learn how to institute certain rituals to change their behavior is less well-defined. Managers and other employees who have attended HR seminars may find this plan easy to use, but self-employed people and others less familiar with "training" may be unable to recognize their behavior patterns and change them.

Book: The Effective Executive

The Effective Executive
by Peter F. Drucker

Overall Effectiveness

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.

Productivity for the knowledge worker means the ability to get the right things done. It means effectiveness.

Assumption is that effectiveness can be learned and that is my over-arching goal, to become more effective.

1. Know Where My Time Goes

Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can brought under their control.

2. Focus on Outward Contribution

Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, “What results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.

3. Build on My Strengths

Effective executives build on strengths – their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that is, on what they can do. They do not build on weakness. They do not start out with the things they cannot do.

4. Concentrate on Areas Where Superior Performance Will Produce Outstanding Results

Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first – and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.

5. Effective Decisions

Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system – of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on facts.” And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.

Book: How Full is Your Bucket, Tom Rath & Donald Clifton

How Full Is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life
by Tom Rath, Donald O. Clifton

In this brief but significant book, the authors, a grandfather-grandson team, explore how using positive psychology in everyday interactions can dramatically change our lives. Clifton (coauthor of Now, Discover Your Strengths) and Rath suggest that we all have a bucket within us that needs to be filled with positive experiences, such as recognition or praise. When we're negative toward others, we use a dipper to remove from their buckets and diminish their positive outlook. When we treat others in a positive manner, we fill not only their buckets but ours as well. The authors illustrate how this principle works in the areas of business and management, marriage and other personal relationships and in parenting through studies covering a 40-year span, many in association with the Gallup Poll. While acknowledging that most lives have their share of misfortune, the authors also make clear that how misfortune affects individuals depends largely on their level of positive energy and confidence. The authors also underscore that our human interactions provide most of the joys or disappointments we receive from life. The book comes with a unique access code to www.bucketbook.com, which offers a positive impact assessment and drop-shaped note cards that can be used to give praise and recognition to others.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description:
How did you feel after your last interaction with another person? Did that person-your spouse, best friend, coworker, or even a stranger -fill your bucket" by making you feel more positive? Or did that person "dip from your bucket," leaving you more negative than before? The number one New York Times and number one Business Week bestseller, How Full Is Your Bucket? reveals how even the briefest interactions affect your relationships, productivity, health, and longevity. Organized around a simple metaphor of a dipper and a bucket, and grounded in 50 years of research, this book will show you how to greatly increase the positive moments in your work and your life-while reducing the negative. Filled with discoveries, powerful strategies, and engaging stories, How Full Is Your Bucket? is sure to inspire lasting changes and has all the makings of a timeless classic.

How Full is Your Bucket Web Site

Book: Innovation and Entrepreneurship - Peter F. Drucker

Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles

Peter F. Drucker

According to Drucker, the essential purpose of a business is to create a customer. To this end, only marketing and innovation can produce results; all other activities are simply part of the cost of doing business.

The Practice of Innovation: Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource.

The purposeful innovation resulting from analysis, system, and hard work is all that can be discussed and presented as the practice of innovation. But this is all that need be presented since it surely covers at least 90 percent of all effective innovations. And the extraordinary performer in innovation, as in every other area, will be effective only if grounded in the discipline and master of it.

Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis of the opportunities. It begins with the analysis of the opportunities. It begins with thinking through what I have called the sources of innovative opportunities.

All the sources of innovation should be systematically analyzed and systematically studied. It is not enough to be alerted to them. The search has to be organized, and must be done on a regular systematic basis.

Innovation is both conceptual and perceptual. Go out to look, to ask, to listen. The cannot be stressed often enough. They work out analytically what the innovation has to be to satisfy an opportunity. And then they go out and look at the customers, the users, to see what their expectations, their values, their needs are.

An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused. It should do only one thing, otherwise it confuses. If it is on simple, it won’t work.

All effective innovations are breathtakingly simple. Indeed, the greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say: “This is obvious. Why didn’t I think of it?”

Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing.

A successful innovation aims at leadership. If an innovation does not aim at leadership from the beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough, and therefore unlikely to be capable of establishing itself.

Book: First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

Book: First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently
by Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman expose the fallacies of standard management thinking in First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. In seven chapters, the two consultants for the Gallup Organization debunk some dearly held notions about management, such as "treat people as you like to be treated"; "people are capable of almost anything"; and "a manager's role is diminishing in today's economy." "Great managers are revolutionaries," the authors write. "This book will take you inside the minds of these managers to explain why they have toppled conventional wisdom and reveal the new truths they have forged in its place." The authors have culled their observations from more than 80,000 interviews conducted by Gallup during the past 25 years. Quoting leaders such as basketball coach Phil Jackson, Buckingham and Coffman outline "four keys" to becoming an excellent manager: Finding the right fit for employees, focusing on strengths of employees, defining the right results, and selecting staff for talent--not just knowledge and skills. First, Break All the Rules offers specific techniques for helping people perform better on the job. For instance, the authors show ways to structure a trial period for a new worker and how to create a pay plan that rewards people for their expertise instead of how fast they climb the company ladder. "The point is to focus people toward performance," they write. "The manager is, and should be, totally responsible for this." Written in plain English and well organized, this book tells you exactly how to improve as a supervisor. --Dan Ring