The Managers Dilemma

This groundbreaking book provides a framework and set of key concepts enabling leaders to exert their influence over the difficult choices and competing priorities they confront. Compelling stories and vivid case studies help to deliver a serious game plan to any leader who is grappling with burnout caused by the manager's dilemma.

This groundbreaking book provides a framework and set of key concepts enabling leaders to exert their influence over the difficult choices and competing priorities they confront. Compelling stories and vivid case studies help to deliver a serious game plan to any leader who is grappling with burnout caused by the manager's dilemma.

Managerial Dilemmas extends the use of analytical techniques from organisational economics to the spheres of organisational culture and leadership in politics and business.

Why do so many change efforts in our organizations fail? One of a handful of reasons ... unprepared managers. Managers often feel their leaders cook up changes, unleash these changes, then expect managers to do the heavy lifting. That heavy lifting includes both coming to terms with changes personally, then getting their teams on board as well. This is the “Manager’s Dilemma”. Are managers helpless in this kind of situation? Are they set up to fail and disappoint? The answer is no. Even when senior leaders struggle to do their jobs as sponsors of change, there are plenty of things a manager can do to advance the change agenda and perhaps save the day. Steve King unpacks three key roles managers need to play in moments of change: change communicator, change coach, and change advocate .... and provides some simple tools and tactics for getting this job done.

This groundbreaking book provides a framework and set of key concepts enabling leaders to exert their influence over the difficult choices and competing priorities they confront. Compelling stories and vivid case studies help to deliver a serious game plan to any leader who is grappling with burnout caused by the manager's dilemma.

Robert Smith's The Space Telescope sets the fascinating and disturbing history of this massive venture within the context of 'Big Science'. Launched at a cost of no more than $2 billion, the Space Telescope turned out to be seriously flawed by imperfections in the construction of its lenses and by solar panels that caused it to shudder when moving from daylight to darkness. Smith analyses how the processes of Big Science, especially those involving the government's funding process for large-scale projects, contributed to those failures. He reveals the astonishingly complex interactions that took place among the scientific community, government and industry and describes the great range of personalities and forces - scientific, technical, political, social, institutional and economic - that played roles in the Space Telescope's history.

Why do so many change efforts in our organizations fail? One of a handful of reasons ... unprepared managers. Managers often feel their leaders cook up changes, unleash these changes, then expect managers to do the heavy lifting. That heavy lifting includes both coming to terms with changes personally, then getting their teams on board as well. This is the "Manager's Dilemma". Are managers helpless in this kind of situation? Are they set up to fail and disappoint? The answer is no. Even when senior leaders struggle to do their jobs as sponsors of change, there are plenty of things a manager can do to advance the change agenda and perhaps save the day. Steve King unpacks three key roles managers need to play in moments of change: change communicator, change coach, and change advocate .... and provides some simple tools and tactics for getting this job done.

An expert in management takes on the conventional wisdom about disruption, looking at companies that proved resilient and offering managers tools for survival. “Disruption” is a business buzzword that has gotten out of control. Today everything and everyone seem to be characterized as disruptive—or, if they aren't disruptive yet, it's only a matter of time before they become so. In this book, Joshua Gans cuts through the chatter to focus on disruption in its initial use as a business term, identifying new ways to understand it and suggesting new tools to manage it. Almost twenty years ago Clayton Christensen popularized the term in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, writing of disruption as a set of risks that established firms face. Since then, few have closely examined his account. Gans does so in this book. He looks at companies that have proven resilient and those that have fallen, and explains why some companies have successfully managed disruption—Fujifilm and Canon, for example—and why some like Blockbuster and Encyclopedia Britannica have not. Departing from the conventional wisdom, Gans identifies two kinds of disruption: demand-side, when successful firms focus on their main customers and underestimate market entrants with innovations that target niche demands; and supply-side, when firms focused on developing existing competencies become incapable of developing new ones. Gans describes the full range of actions business leaders can take to deal with each type of disruption, from “self-disrupting” independent internal units to tightly integrated product development. But therein lies the disruption dilemma: A firm cannot practice both independence and integration at once. Gans shows business leaders how to choose their strategy so their firms can deal with disruption while continuing to innovate.