THE BEST MANAGERS DO IT UNDER THE RADAR

摘要

Forget robotics, the internet and big data. The most important technology in the world today is for getting things done through other people, and it's called management. There is, however, a puzzle at the heart of it. We know what good management looks like - so the mystery is: why is it so rare? This is the question that Julian Birkinshaw sets himself in his new book Becoming a Better Boss: Why Good Management is so Difficult. The book emerged from earlier work at the London Business School on employee-centred management, which in turn started from the insight - and unwritten truth - that management is always written from the point of view of the manager, never the managed, and this of course is part of the reason that it so often goes wrong. Perhaps this is why, as Birkinshaw put it in a previous book, large organisations are full of fear and distrust and are "with notable exceptions - miserable places to spend our working lives".