Building Organizational Capacity for Change The Leader's New Mandate

Most books on management principles focus on particular rules of thumb and best management practices. While the latter approach provides useful guidance and insights, it does not give executives much of an understanding of what bad management can entail and the damage that it can produce. Indeed, good management makes the most sense when it can be directly contrasted with examples of bad management and its implications. To fill this critical gap, this book adopts a fresh approach, identifying cases of bad management from real-life business situations experienced by the author (chapter 3) and contrasting them with good management practice as concisely defined in chapter 2. The sound management principles so developed can subsequently be applied to a broad range of settings for personal careers in traditional enterprises or adapted to management of small firms (chapter 5) or international companies (chapter 6). Also, they can be used to establish role models and mentor topics for individuals (id est, ideal managers) and excellent companies (chapter 4). The last chapters show how good management practice can be applied to better handle a wide range of current world problems faced not only by companies (chapter 7) but also by national governments and international institutions (chapters 8 and 9) during these particularly uncertain times. Finally in the appendices, there are two specific cases illustrating the usage of rigorous management techniques to analyze events and situations outside the company business arena. This book will be of interest to practicing managers and to students of management. It can be a useful support to mainstream academic books for current students but is of greatest value to postgraduates in their first or second job, for older managers who have not previously been exposed to this kind of material, and for various researchers or counselors who could further develop certain of the novel themes proposed here.