High Praise from the United Kingdom
It’s always nice to hear that someone has said something nice about you, but this one made me laugh. Not that it wasn’t high praise – it definitely was. It’s just that I was reading The Economist this morning, which is published in London, and they said some things about “managers” that sounded absurd to this American.
Apparently, managers are not the same thing on the other side of the Atlantic that they are here. Just two phrases, taken from the “Bartleby” column about management, should make you wonder what kind of people they are talking about:
- “Managers are incentivized with share options”, and
- “That encourages them to pay spare cash to investors in the form of dividends and buy-backs”
I’ve worked with many managers over my 40-year career as a management consultant and I daresay not more than 1% of them has ever been “incentivized with share options”. I’m pretty sure that none of them ever paid “spare cash to investors” in any form, either. I bet 50% of managers in the US do not even know who their organization’s investors are, much less crossing their palms with silver. Reading an article in The Economist (full disclosure: I read it cover-to-cover every single week) is fine until I trip over something like “managers are incentivized with share options”. I’ll have to tell that one to the Water Maintenance Manager at the Department of Public Utilities.
The difference on this side of the Atlantic is that we have so many names for the different kinds of people who are in positions of organizational authority, such as Executives, C-Suite (CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, etc.), Department managers, Team managers, Directors, Supervisors – I could go on. A “manager” doesn’t necessarily mean a person is even in the top 1/3 of the organizational ladder – it means that s/he oversees a group of people who are responsible for a certain section of the organization.
And yet, Boove, a UK bookseller, read our book – The Four Conversations – and rated it #17 for “books-on-being-a-good-manager”. They said the book “breaks down the task of management (they used that word!) into the four kinds of conversations needed to move any project from initiation to completion.” That’s a good way to say what it does – I never quite thought of it as breaking down the task of management.
Boove also posted a link to Amazon, for people to buy the book, and it also included a little summary of the book: “Most conversations to get things done at work are of one of four types – initiative conversations, conversations for understanding, performance conversations, or conversations for closure – but they are often done poorly or misused. This book shows managers and employees how to use the right conversation at the right time, plan and start each conversation well, and finish each conversation effectively.” I couldn’t have said it better myself!
Here’s Boove listing for the book:
#17 The Four Conversations by Jeffrey D Ford
Awarded Best Management Book by 800 CEO-READ and Rated the #5 Best Business Book by The Globe and Mail (Canada) breaks down the task of management into the four kinds of conversations needed to move any project from initiation to completion. Armed with a solid body of research plus their own first-hand observations, Jeffrey Ford, Emeritus Professor of management with the Max M. Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio and his management consultant wife, Laurie Ford, provide a clear outline for management success whether in the corporate world or at home. Easy to read and immediately applicable, this book is the best guide to good management available.
I loved that last line, “Easy to read and immediately applicable, this book is the best guide to good management available.” THANKS MATES!
