Description

People are the greatest resource of any organisation. What does this mean in practice? All ideas, plans and products begin in the human imagination. Can you manage the human imagination? If so, how? Or do we have to go beyond management? This book explores these questions in a practical way.Managing is very often focused on problems – what goes wrong and how to put it right, so there is a constant stream of new problem solving management ideas. New management practices are introduced, sometimes they work, and sometimes they do not. Sometimes it seems that changes are simply being made for the sake of it. Many management initiatives are greeted with scepticism, and rightly so, when the instigators of the initiative expect everyone in the company except themselves to buy into the new practice. Quality standards may result in a superbly documented, but otherwise unchanged flow of problems.This book does not present another different management initiative, but looks at central principles. What is common to all systems of management? People. Seventy per cent of management tasks are dealing with people. These people are your bosses, your peers, your team, your customers, and, dare we say it – yourself. A manager is not a shell of tasks and functions, but a real person with hopes and feelings. Unless management practices take those human qualities into consideration they will fail in the short term rather than the long term. A good idea is only as good as its implementation, people make it real in practice. The main task of managing day to day is to motivate and deal with people to achieve goals.This is a practical book, but not a prescriptive one. You are the expert at your job. Our aim is to suggest choices for you to achieve what you want, in a time of rapid business change.