Sunday, May 5, 2013

Book: Managing Right for the First Time

By David C Baker
Finished the book in two days; I needed to as I had only two days. But then also in the preface of the book, the author himself suggests to finish the book in a couple sittings.
I feel grateful that I got to read this book before my first day. I realized I didn't know somethings; moreover, I had wrong assumptions or understandings of some other things.
I will give the book 5 stars in the review; the main thing I can say about it is that it felt real. No fluff, no useless statistics, practical, to the point. If you are interested in some takeaway, here you are:

  • There is no connection between "doing" and "managing"
  • Management is having a vision and forging ahead to make it happen even when the answers are not obvious
  • Take risk. Make mistakes. It's better than inaction.
  • Management can be lonely.
  • Misunderstanding is inevitable. Be prepared.
  • Be prepared to be wrong.
  • Set expectations early and clearly.
  • Benefits of content employees is that they are swayed to join you, more likely to stay, then consistently do better work for you and your customers because valuable mental nervy is not spent on protecting their own interests.
  • Don't pretend you are one of then cause you are not.
  • You are managing a person only if you are part of the group defining their compensations and you are providing with their performance review.
  • In a nutshell: management is to know what you want, find the right person, make sure they understand what you want, reinforce and model this behavior, then talk about how well the employee is doing.


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