First Person: Tales of Management Courage and Tenacity (Harvard Business Review Book) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0875846742 ISBN 13: 9780875846743

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press, 1996

Synopsis

In this collection of first-person accounts from the Harvard Business Review, the 11 contributors describe the hazards and frustrations of trying to be a good manager. From "How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead" and "Reluctant Entrepreneur" to "Nothing Prepared Me to Manage AIDS" and "The Purpose at the Heart of Management, " these essays document the complex and often conflicting responsibilities of the manager: conceiving and implementing strategy; motivating people to do what's best for customers, the business, and themselves; putting themselves in the hot seat of authority while pushing people toward shared responsibility; and developing sensitivity to the needs of subordinates while having the courage to say no. "Unrelentingly compelling.... The perfect refutation for anyone who claims a career in business is boring." — Quality Digest

About this title

About the Author

Harvard Business Review is the leading destination for smart management thinking. Through its flagship magazine, 11 international licensed editions, books from Harvard Business Review Press, and digital content and tools published on HBR.org, Harvard Business Review provides professionals around the world with rigorous insights and best practices to lead themselves and their organizations more effectively and to make a positive impact.

From the Back Cover

First Person presents memorable stories of management achievement as told by the people who lived them. With the authority of personal experience, 12 executives narrate their journeys across the perilous landscape of business leadership. In an array of crises - the illness and death of an employee, the turnaround of a failing factory, the demise of a blue-chip industrial giant - the accounts of these managers reveal the flesh-and-blood drama in common business challenges and their uncommon, often courageous, responses. Drawn from a series of acclaimed essays in the Harvard Business Review, the tales told in First Person bear witness to how difficult management really is. Brilliantly analytic and rigorously self-critical, these are not conventional success stories. Some do not have happy endings, and some do not yet have endings at all. But each details the process of struggle and error leading to insight, and together they provide an invaluable guide to the essence of great management.

Reviews

It has always been difficult to define what management is and explain what a manager does. One of the earliest definitions is probably still most apt. More than 70 years ago, Mary Parker Follett said management is "getting things done through people." It is those "people" that are the crux of the matter. There are as many job descriptions for managers as there are varieties of human experience and behavior. That is why case studies have proved effective in showing how to manage. The 12 narratives gathered here describe problems (and solutions) hardly even hinted at in textbooks but which managers face every day--from learning an employee has AIDS to discovering that a company's product poses severe health and environmental risks. All 12 essays previously appeared in Harvard Business Review's "First Person" column, of which Teal was an editor. David Rouse

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0875846742
• ISBN 13: 9780875846743
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 267
• Editor: Teal Thomas