Book Review: Everything I need to know about being a manager I learnedfrom my kids by Ian Durston

So, from the title, do you expect a kind of folksy tale of happy families and happy teams? Good, because that describes the book well. The books starts very un-managerially with the birth details of the children and then ties 'becoming a parent' in to 'becoming a manager'. I actually think I would enjoy working with more people who read this book since, I cannot imagine that some of the managers I work with treat their children like they treat their staff - at least I hope for the child's sake that they don't.

So... what do we learn?

amazon.co.uk | amazon.com

Book Review: Detox Your Desk by Theo Theobald and Gary Cooper

Yet another time management book. This one starts well and by page xi in the introduction I have warmed to the notion of a "zero tolerance workspace". But then we hit an "analysis" phase and we learn...nothing for a while. I suppose this section tries to build up the belief set that we need to change our habits and why, and point out your bad habits.

But really we already bought the book to change our habits - so give me the details. Tell me the system...

amazon.co.uk | amazon.com

Book Review: The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins

Most management books offer some platitudes, have 2 or 3 useful sentences and then lots of padding. "The First 90 Days" offers a real exception

I will not pretend to summarise all the useful information in this book for this book review. But I hope to whet your appetite so that you go out, buy this book and feast ravenously upon it.

I guess I relate to it so much because I have moved from site to site and job to job so often - mainly as a consultant, or contractor, but latterly as a full time employee. I have experienced a lot of transitions, and I know how hard those first 90 days can seem. Lessons I learned on my own:

• track your successes - otherwise you'll look back and wonder what happened (it all moves so fast)


• set expectations early with your boss (particularly on how you can evaluate success together)


• evaluate your team quickly and don't shirk the hard early decisions

Michael Watkins covers all this and more. And I wish I had read this before.

[amazon.co.uk] [amazon.com]

Book Summaries - how to gain more knowledge, faster, and easier

I have a problem with many business and management books. so many of them seem to have one idea, or 10 ideas strung out for 250 pages with lots of boring stories and examples, or worse - written in parable form. I really just want to get to the meat and substance of the book.

I spent a long time improving my reading speed, and yet I still want to find ways of cramming more valuable information into my skull more quickly and more easily. So I started to look for ways to outsource my reading - at least partially. I found various book summary sites. My initial thoughts were this would be a way of whittling out the dross of business books more easily and identifying the books that I really want to read.

I wasn't sure if I was going to find them useful or if I was going to end up signing away some money for a pile of badly written essays.

But I decided to sign up as an experiment anyway.

Why should a manager treat their staff optimistically?

People tend to meet expectations, their own, and those of the people who they have a relationship with.

I assume most people have encountered, even if 2nd hand, "Pygmalion In The Classroom" - the 1968 study of kids and teachers expectations.

I see no reason why the same dynamic does not work in business.