The Exceptional Manager: Making the Difference
Rick Delbridge, Lynda Gratton and Gerry Johnson, Oxford University Press, 2006, xxx+ 264 pages, £25.00.
For an economist, this is a useful book to have on the shelf. The first part, setting the scene, reviews the decline of British industry and the reasons for it. The second part, the building blocks, catalogues the management techniques suggested to deal with decline. There is, inter alia, a list of techniques before the acknowledgements.
There is an impressive list of people who contributed to this book. The three lead authors pulled together the contributions. It is not clear who contributed what. The book as a whole represents the collective effort of all the competitiveness fellows, who contributed both individual research expertise, and many discussions about other related work in small groups and the whole AIM (Advanced Institute of Management) fellowship.
The book is about more than economics. It covers sociology, politics, office politics, psychology, etc. The third part is the most interesting for those already familiar with management literature. It covers the newest ideas and has an interesting range of examples.
Chapter 7, on the pitfalls in successful integration of promising practices, discusses the danger in following fads, adopting only the easy elements of practices rather than the difficult and crucial core and constantly introducing new practices without successfully following through on implementation. To succeed, interrelated issues need to be considered, such as, complementarity, fit, context, causality and challenging complacency.
In chapter 8 the message is that managers need to maximise the potential of individual and organisational knowledge through:
Chapter 9, making intelligent decisions, discusses the pitfalls of group-think and the escalation of commitments. It outlines the techniques of frame-analysis worksheets, causal-mapping processes, group decision support systems, Delphi methods and scenario planning. New terminology to me is signature processes. This is the way in which senior executives support co-operative working.
Chapter 10, co-operating across boundaries, discusses how four organisations, BP, OgilvyOne, Nokia and RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), managed it. The final two chapters are about how managers should manage their HR department. There are extensive notes at the end of each chapter so that the literature on particular ideas can be pursued. Another good reason to have the book on the shelf.
Linda Hesselman
University College London