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Your Management Sucks: The 7 Day Crash Course for Declaring War on Your Business - Hardcover

Stevens, Mark

 
9781400054930: Your Management Sucks: The 7 Day Crash Course for Declaring War on Your Business
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400054931 ISBN 13: 9781400054930
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Like a mirror, Your Management Sucks reveals important truths that you may deal with . . . or choose to ignore or put on the back burner.

Everyone manages someone or something . . . your own life and career, an administrative assistant, hundreds or thousands of people. How well or poorly you manage has a profound impact on your personal success.

Mark Stevens makes the compelling point that at any given time everyone’s management sucks. It can, however, be improved and rethought so you can move away from patterns and habits that you can easily fall victim to.

Start by declaring constructive war on yourself. Look in the mirror and identify those invisible traps and barriers. Then leave the land of business-as-usual with the seven-point plan Stevens has used to build both his own extraordinary career and his marketing and strategy consulting firm. You’ll soon find that you’re in the fast lane, easily outpacing your passive peers who rarely, if ever, challenge the how and why of what they do.

Mark Stevens—a street-smart kid from Queens, New York, who has gone on to phenomenal success—not only gives advice to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups, he takes his own. Concerned that his business, MSCO, would continue its steady but limited growth, he announced one morning during breakfast with his wife, “Honey, I’m going to fire everyone.” That intention, while actually carried out over a lengthy period of time, was based on one simple insight—that his team of good people wouldn’t be able to put MSCO over the top to make it the best. From that episode came the ideas that form the core of Your Management Sucks:

• Developing your own personal killer app—the “differentiator” that will make you more than the sum of your parts

• Unleashing your virtual Manhattan Project: the plan that will change your life, your business, and the world

• Challenging the oxymoron of conventional wisdom

• Applying C+A+M: The universal equation for perpetual growth

In the same straight-talking, no-BS style of his last book, Your Marketing Sucks, Stevens offers brass-tacks examples of management approaches that do—and don’t—work and inspires people to ask themselves the tough questions they need to answer in order to become true leaders.


Your Seven-Point Declaration of War on Management That Sucks

1. Unleash the Power of a Personal Philosophy: Don’t just rock the boat of your business, be prepared to capsize it.

2. Challenge the Oxymoron of Conventional Wisdom: The so-called smart thing is all too often stale thinking masquerading as truth.

3. Take a Good Look in the Mirror . . . Do You See a Leader? The worst damn thing in the world you can do is copy success. Be an original.

4. Develop Your Personal Killer App: Become greater than the sum of your parts.

5. Unleash Your Manhattan Project: Implement the plan that will change your world and your life.

6. Capture Ideas with a Butterfly Net: Seek out what you need to know and use it for personal growth.

7. Apply C+A+M, the Universal Equation for Perpetual Growth: Win customers and make them deliriously happy.



Also available as an eBook

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Stevens is CEO of MSCO, a marketing and strategy consulting firm. The author of the Business Week bestseller Your Marketing Sucks, Mark is totally unique in a plain-vanilla world of business experts. He has evolved from being an adviser to clients on specific issues such as marketing programs to being their “secretary of war,” advising them on personal and professional strategies that will get them to the next level of success. Mark is also the author of such prominent books as The Big Eight, Sudden Death: The Rise and Fall of E.F. Hutton, and Extreme Management.

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Unleashing the Power of a Personal Philosophy

One morning in the year 2001, I woke up and thought to myself, “I’ve built a nice company. There are fifty-seven people in my employ . . . I’ve got a full client roster . . . MSCO Inc. is profitable.

“Very profitable.”

Then I meandered downstairs to have coffee with my wife and said, “Honey, I’m going to fire everybody.”

She said, “What are you talking about?”

(I get that a lot.)

So I explained.

“We’ve got a team of good people. And good people can build a nice company . . . but they can’t build a great one. So I’m going to fire everybody and start recruiting only the really top performers in every business discipline. When we built this business, we viewed it as a work in progress, always tinkering with all gears and levers to make it better. And better. But one day, for who knows what reason, we stopped. Or maybe I should stay I stopped. But no more.”

Looking back, I’m not sure my wife believed I was serious. More like first-thoughts-in-the-morning wishful thinking. But I knew from the moment that I announced my war plan over a bowl of Shredded Wheat, I was armed and dangerous and ready to go.

Not that it was a whim. For a year or so I’d been thinking about it, ruminating over it, assessing the risks, dreaming of the benefits, and exploring the implications. I founded MSCO on the principle that the marketplace was lacking a new kind of entity—a hybrid between a marketing firm and strategic consultancy—and I pulled it all together and developed a methodology and created a brand and built a team and secured clients and went through the trial and error, the donnybrook, the roller-coaster wonder of making it all work.

The roots of the business trace back to a warm June day right around my twenty-second birthday. As a hard-core, antiestablishment, I’ll-do-it-my-way 1960s kid, I had taken a zigzag route to career and the workplace. High school held little interest for me. (Living in the New York City borough of Queens, I could always—any time of year—pick up a girlfriend and drive out to Jones Beach. So who the hell wanted to sit in a dreary cell of a room in the dreary prison of a building called Bayside High School? Not Mark Stevens.) Next I meandered through a third-rate college—took off a semester to care for my family upon the death of my father (who left us $84, no hard assets, and Himalayan bills), and later on I took off another semester student-partying in Paris.

Funny story there. I went to Paris with the $300 I inherited when my grandmother died (I lost my dad and my beloved maternal grandparents all in eighteen months). Naturally, I’m living in pathetic dumps, but the wine is cheap and the girls are amazing and I spend my summer days as the only guy lying in the sun on a French houseboat (the Piscine Deligny) with two hundred women in Band-Aid bikinis. Life was good, and then it got better.

One of the girls I was dating—the wealthy daughter of an even wealthier Parisian businessman—was moving to Algeria for some crazy social cause and asked me to house-sit her splendiferous pied-à-terre overlooking superposh Place de Victor Hugo. So there I was with a pauper’s wallet and I’m bringing dates back from discos to this smasheroo place and they’re thinking, “Yeeow, I’ve got me a rich American.”

Anyway, I got sick and wound up in the American Hospital of Paris. Economics dictated that I return home, so I went straight from the rues de Paris to the streets of New York once again, finished school, and wound up taking a job at Texaco, working on a magazine they publish to teach their service-station guys (who were much more interested in reading Jugs than the rag I was working on) how to sell more tires, batteries, and accessories. Fuuuuuuun!

For the first time in my life, I took a close-up look at the American workplace—Fortune 100 style—and yikes, I didn’t like what I saw. My reaction was more like “Get me the hell out of here now!” All of these middle-aged folks are basically sleeping at their desks and then lining up for lunches the size of Thanksgiving Day feasts at 12:00 sharp. After that a nice nap with the office door closed and then out the door at 4:59.

Needless to say, I had plenty of time on my hands at Texaco (I could do a month’s worth of assigned tasks in a day), but instead of joining the chorus of deep snoring, I started daydreaming. About possibilities. For new businesses, of all things. And it struck the former sixties idealist (me) that there was a void in the media for a syndicated newspaper column that would provide advice to small-business owners. And to make a long story short, I contacted the Long Island newspaper Newsday with the idea and they said yes (“If you show us what you can do by writing twelve columns for free”) and I was off and running. In no time, I was self-employed, the head of a fledgling media business that kept expanding over the years, increasing revenues and expanding in scope until it evolved into MSCO—a global marketing firm advising senior managers of small, midsize, and very large companies on how to grow their businesses.

And just when the company ascended to a level of success I hadn’t dreamed of when I formed the nucleus twenty-five years before during the Texaco days—and there was every reason to heed the axiom “If ain’t broken, don’t fix it”—I decided to reengineer it from the ground up. To face the fact that MSCO was, is, and always will be a work in progress. I had built a successful business, but I feared that unless I declared war on myself, the enterprise I managed would succumb to mediocrity, and I wasn’t going to be part of that. At the time, MSCO was good at identifying precisely why companies were failing to grow at a substantial pace or were poorly managing explosive growth in a way that would enable them to build on their success. We had insight and know- how and an uncanny way of developing unique marketing methodologies that were fresh and could help specific companies deal with their unique issues in a way that would deliver measurable results expeditiously.

But there were weak points, too, and I saw them. It was like staring into the sun in the midst of a solar eclipse. Painful as it was, I kept looking and thinking and seeing:

•Team members who were at the limits of their intellectual powers and incapable of achieving continuous growth

•Lapses in execution that diminished the power of our collective wisdom

I had to act. I wanted my business, as good and profitable as it was, to be the kind of elegant organism that can move through life with the capacity to grow and evolve and expand and to see through to other dimensions as it finds new sources of knowledge and leverages them. I wanted it to be the kind of company that challenges assumptions and finds the business truths that lie behind them. And then I wanted it to pivot and challenge its own assumptions. To forever dazzle everyone and everything it came in contact with.

Over the course of a challenging but insightful and highly exhilarating two-year period, I took the business apart and put it back together again. The process was painful because I was close to my employees. I liked them. But I instinctively knew that as a manager I had to divorce emotion and friendship from the challenging mission of growing a business.

There was nothing easy...

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400054931
ISBN 13 
9781400054930
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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