1. The best managers reject conventional wisdom.
2. The best managers treat every employee as an individual.
3. The best managers never try to fix weaknesses; instead they focus on strengths and talent.
4. The best managers know they are on stage everyday. They know their people are watching every move they make.
5. Measuring employee satisfaction is vital information for your investors.
6. People leave their immediate managers, not the companies they work for.
7. The best managers are those that build a work environment where the employees answer positively to these 12 Questions:
01. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
02. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
03. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best everyday?
04. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
05. Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?
06. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
07. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
08. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
09. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had the opportunity at work to learn and grow?
01. Know what can be taught, and what requires a natural talent.
02. Set the right outcomes, not steps. Standardize the end but not the means. As long as the means are within the company's legal boundaries and industry standards, let the employee use his own style to deliver the result or outcome you want.
03. Motivate by focusing on strengths, not weaknesses.
04. Casting is important, if an employee is not performing at excellence, maybe she is not cast in the right role.
05. Every role is noble, respect it enough to hire for talent to match.
06. A manager must excel in the art of the interview. See if the candidate's recurring patterns of behavior match the role he is to fulfill. Ask open-ended questions and let him talk. Listen for specifics.
07. Find ways to measure, count, and reward outcomes.
08. Spend time with your best people. Give constant feedback. If you can't spend an hour every quarter talking to an employee, then you shouldn't be a manager.
09. There are many ways of alleviating a problem or non-talent. Devise a support system, find a complementary partner for him, or an alternative role.
10. Do not promote someone until he reaches his level of incompetence; simply offer bigger rewards within the same range of his work. It is better to have an excellent highly paid waitress or bartender on your team than promote him or her to a poor starting-level bar manager.
11. Some homework to do: Study the best managers in the company and revise training to incorporate what they know. Send your talented people to learn new skills or knowledge. Change recruiting practices to hire for talent, revise employee job descriptions and qualifications.
Personal MBA Project
01. Mastery by George Leonard
02. Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton
03. Getting Things Done by David Allen
04. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
05. What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan
06. Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business by Ram Charan
07. On Competition by Michael Porter
08. Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne
09. Seeing What's Next by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, Scott D. Anthony
10. The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker
11. First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman
12. The One Thing You Need to Know by Marcus Buckingham
13. The Essays of Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett & Lawrence Cunningham
14. Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger
15. The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Finance for Nonfinancial Managers by Robert A. Cooke
16. Essentials of Accounting by Robert Newton Anthony and Leslie K. Pearlman
17. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt & Jeff Cox
18. Lean Thinking by James Womack & Daniel Jones
19. The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel
20. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
21. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
22. The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula & Richard Tong
23. Purple Cow by Seth Godin
24. Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin
25. The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
26. The Bootstrapper's Bible by Seth Godin
27. Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
28. On Writing Well by William Zinsser
29. How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
30. Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
31. The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer
32. Flawless Consulting by Peter Block
33. Real Estate Principles for the New Economy by Norman Miller & David Geltner
34. Getting To Yes by Fisher, Ury, and Patton
35. Principles of Statistics by M.G. Bulmer
36. A Primer on Business Ethics by Tibor Machan & James Chesher
37. Brand New by Nancy F. Koehn
38. American Business, 1920-2000 by Thomas K. McCraw, John H. Franklin, and A. S. Eisenstadt
39. The Little Book of Business Wisdom by Peter Krass (Editor)
40. Re-imagine by Tom Peters
41. The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun
42. The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch