First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently | Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman | Buckingham is full of the right stuff

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First, Break All t...

	First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman Simon & Schuster, 1999 - 255 pages average customer review:based on 263 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great prep course for new managers!!

My son had just been made a manager of a large multi-location furniture and appliance and tv company. I purchased (First, Break all the rules) for him to give him some insight to being a manager. He devoured the CD's and called for more.
I choose the same author and purchased more of his work. Thanks for having this quality product available.

Whoever wrote the description of this book on cd did a great job. It was the reason I bought it.

Buckingham is full of the right stuff

This is a great book with outstanding information, the research involved and sheer numbers of people that participated is mind boggling.

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Best Management Audiobook Available

What separates Buckingham and his co-author from the crowded bookshelves is their reliance upon statistics instead of anecdotes. There are too many management books out there that tell you what to do without backing their words up, so this book is well worth the investment. The audiobook, narrated by Buckingham, is especially rewarding, since it's one you'll want to listen to every month to remind yourself that there is a better way to manage and that you need to stay on that path.

Ideas that are applicable to managers--and a lot more!

Heard FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES by Marcus Buckingham
and Curt Coffman of the Gallup Organization . . . it was the report
on a massive in-depth study of great managers across a wide
variety of situations, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to
key players in small, entrepreuneurial firms.

It got me thinking about the difference that effective leadership
at the top can make and how, unfortunately, this doesn't
happen as much as it perhaps should.

Many of the ideas I've come across before . . . yet it wasn't until
I heard the spin placed on them by the authors that I came to the
realization that though they were seemingly basic, implementation
of them isn't always quite so simple.

Also, I realized that most of the ideas can easily be applied to great
parenting, great running of virtually any club or organization, etc.

For instance:
* Best managers don't treat everybody like they want to be
treated. Instead, they treat each employee as how he or she wants
to be treated.

And to find this out is easy:
* Just ask!

Among the other valuable tidbits I gained from listening were these:
* Effective managers spend their most time with their best people.

* Great managers know that any attempt to impose one best
way is doomed to fail.

* Never try to perfect people.

* Great managers focus on the future with their people.

* When told an employee was late, great manager almost
always ask why.

Buckingham also did the reading of FIRST, BREAK ALL THE
RULES . . . I was so impressed with this book that I'm now going
to read his other works, including his latest: GO PUT YOUR
STRENGTHS TO WORK.

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Managing by Exception

This book was on the shelf of the best manager I've ever had. This was my reason to pick up this book and I am glad I did. It helped me better understand what made him a great manager. It conjectures that each individual is unique and must be treated individually. In a world heading towards the Huxley anti-utopia where human resource is managed on an assembly line governed by unquestioned rules, this book launches a direct attack at conventional management wisdom and outlines how great managers successfully manage individuals by exception.

Like many popular management books, this is a one-concept book and it does not rest until it repeatedly drills the concept in, while invalidating all competing concepts. This is a limitation that must be embraced by the reader in order to benefit from this book.

The guys at Gallup have devised a great tool that identifies the top strengths of an individual. Read Now, Discover Your Strengths for more. This book builds on top of that underlying concept with the perspective of managing people. Although the findings of their interviews are presented well, the authors go a little overboard in bashing certain management idioms that are allegedly popular. Starting with the title selection for the book to repeated trashing of the presumed "rules", the authors have let themselves get distracted. Even if you look beyond their vested interest in doing so, the book may have been more effective if they chose to replace 80% of their criticism with more material from the 80K interviews conducted.

Gallup's theory about focusing on strengths and working around weaknesses is extremely powerful and effective. However, despite this being the primary area of expertise of Gallup Research, they seem to miss one fundamental point about strengths and weaknesses. They are two sides of the same coin and are not mutually exclusive things. Gallup does elaborate on the notion of "talent" - the repeated pattern of thoughts that drive your behavior when presented with any situation indicate your inherent qualities a.k.a. talent. However, the theory does not go the extra step to connect the dots - the very talent that shows up as strengths in certain situations is exactly what shows up as weaknesses in certain other situations. Instead of treating strengths and weaknesses as the unifying function of talent and context, Gallup's work treats them as two separate sets of attributes of an individual.

Had it not been for the immensely powerful concepts that this book and other Gallup Research books illustrate, I would not resist my temptation to take away more stars. This book is a keeper.

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