Just Add Management: Seven Steps to Creating a Productive Workplace and Motivating Your Employees In Challenging Times - Hardcover

Dibachi, Farzad; Dibachi, Rhonda

9780071408004: Just Add Management: Seven Steps to Creating a Productive Workplace and Motivating Your Employees In Challenging Times

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071408002 ISBN 13: 9780071408004

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 2002

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A manager's tough-love guide to rebuilding corporate value

After more than a decade of experimentation, hands-off managment has proven to be a bust. When managers don't know what their people are doing all day, budgets soar and profits plummet. Just Add Management offers managers a clear, practical program for getting employees back on track by:

Refocusing corporate culture on getting work done
Setting priorities and align projects with those priorities
Creating and enforcing processes and tracking progress

Farzad and Rhonda Dibachi, a seasoned Silicon Valley husband-and-wife management team, bring unique technical and business backgrounds to the book, including expertise in helping companies focus on doing what matters and a mature, hardnosed approach to business.

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From the Back Cover:

It's time to get back to business--real business. A decade of hands-off management has produced a stream of cost overruns, incomplete projects, and reduced productivity, not to mention a growing list of accounting scandals. Companies that prided themselves on thinking outside the box have been boxed in by their neglect of basic business processes and a failure to insist on accountability and quantifiable results.

In Just Add Management Farzad and Rhonda Love Dibachi reveal that the technological advances of the past decade actually have brought most business organizations to the brink of a major productivity breakthrough. In order to leap the final hurdle, however, managers must find ways to set the priorities, track the progress, and measure the productivity of knowledge workers.

This step-by-step guide to managing knowledge workers explores the realities and myths of today's knowledge workplace, introduces the archetypes who populate it, and shows managers how to set the right tone in the office for every employee every day. It demonstrates ways in which managers can establish transparency--the state in which every member of the enterprise understands his or her role in the larger scheme and how that role influences the success of the entire organization.

The authors introduce time-tested, proven management techniques that enable managers to set and broadcast priorities, agree upon and enforce processes, and track and monitor employees' progress and accountability. They also show managers how to support this accountability management system with knowledge tools that provide accurate, timely business data in order to help organizations work smarter. These techniques provide the mechanics of visibility--data-driven insight into which employees are doing what and how well they are doing.

Without the oversight of mature, focused managers who stress business fundamentals and organizational goals, all of the technological breakthroughs of the past decade are just expensive toys for technocrats and computer mavens. Just Add Management gives businesses and managers the tools and techniques they need to take control of the knowledge workplace, put their operations back on track, and make the next leap forward in productivity and profitability.

"Just Add Management marries solid, up-to-date productivity techniques with a mature, common-sense message refreshing to any manager. As the Dibachis argue, being smart is not enough. To succeed today you have to have effective, accountable, repeatable processes. This is a concise, well-written guide to getting them, and it's also a lot of fun to read."--Maynard Webb, Chief Operating Officer, eBay

Proven techniques for managing the knowledge workplace

What do Amadeus the artiste, the "just-do-it" Jock, and Darth Maul the Sith Lord have in common? They are three of the archetypes who populate the knowledge workplace--talented, even brilliant workers who can nevertheless drive managers to distraction with their resistance to meeting deadlines, quantifying progress, and demonstrating tangible results. When managed properly, however, these three and others like them can be enormously innovative and productive.

Just Add Management gives managers the tools and techniques they need to provide the "adult supervision" that transforms the knowledge workplace from an expensive playground for overgrown kids into a profit center that powers progress, promotes productivity, and achieves enterprisewide objectives on time and on budget. Using proven, time-tested management techniques, this indispensable guide shows managers how to:

Demand accountability and maturity from workers
Organize the knowledge workplace for consistency, efficiency, and predictability
Establish workplace transparency
Set and broadcast priorities
Track progress on every project every day
Gather accurate, timely business data that help the organization work smarter

What's the secret ingredient your organization needs to turbocharge the knowledge workplace, boost productivity, and take the next leap forward in profitability? Just Add Management!

About the Author:

Farzad Dibachi is the founder and chief executive of Niku. A legend in Silicon Valley, he has appeared on the covers of Upside and Red Herring and has been written about in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, the New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Newsweek. Before forming Niku, Mr. Dibachi was the youngest vice president in Oracle's history. He is a frequent speaker at industry events such as the Project Leadership Conference and BusinessWeek conferences.

Rhonda Love Dibachi is the executive vice president of strategy and planning at Niku. She has held positions at Oracle, Arthur Young (now Ernst & Young), and General Electric.

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