Showing results by author "Julian Birkinshaw" in All Categories

Mind Tools for Managers helps new and experienced leaders develop the skills they need to be more effective in everything they do. It brings together the 100 most important leadership skills - as voted for by 15,000 managers and professionals worldwide - into a single volume, providing an easy-access solutions manual for people wanting to be the best manager they can be. Each chapter details a related group of skills, plus the tools you need to put ideas into practice.

In 1985 Peter Drucker argued for a shift toward an entrepreneurial society, one where “executives in all institutions…make innovation and entrepreneurship a normal, ongoing everyday activity.” This intentionally broad view requires a fundamental change in mindset. Drucker was pushing us to think and act less like employees taking orders and more like free agents, alert and responsive to opportunities whether we work in a startup or in a large corporation.

In the 10-plus years we’ve spent researching team and organizational dynamics and working with more than 50 companies across a dozen industries, we’ve found that when people adopt the right mindset, they can increase their return on failure ratio - not just by minimizing the downsides of projects but also by maximizing the upsides. Some failures provide immediate value in the form of market insights that can be capitalized on.

Julian Birkinshaw, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the London Business School, reports on how it’s easy to get swept up in the glamour of a new idea, but not every management innovation will produce rewards for your company.

There are hundreds of books on management. This is not just another book about what makes an effective manager. Becoming a Better Boss highlights why well-known advice on good management is so rarely heeded. By focusing on management through the eyes of an employee, Julian Birkinshaw gives us insightful and helpful advice on what we might do differently - both as individual managers of others, and as architects of the organizations in which we work. To achieve this, Birkinshaw has spent time working "in the trenches" to remind himself what life as an employee feels like.