Part 5 of Managing by Harold Geneen deals with leadership.

“No one really manages a business by shuffling the numbers or rearranging organizational charts or applying the latest business school formula. What you manage in business is people.”

Leadership is the most important ingredient for success. The top three are:

1. Quality of leadership
2. Climate of growth and opportunity, freed from fear and insecurity, and supported by open, free, and honest communication up and down the ranks
3. Total, wholehearted support in all things, including resources to aid managers in trouble

“The drudgery of the numbers will make you free.”

Part 4 of Managing by Harold Geneen deals with the importance and use of numbers.

• “The numbers are not the business; they are only pictures of the business.”
• “Any significant variation between your expectations and what is actually happening…expressed by numbers, is a signal for action.”
• “The numbers themselves will not tell you what to do…they are only a trigger to thinking.”

According to Geneen, the key job of management is to find out what is happening behind the numbers that report about the business.

Numbers can be accurate or not so accurate, precise or rounded off, detailed or vague. “The professional’s grasp of the numbers is a measure of the control he has over the events that the figures represent.”

“What you are seeking is comprehension of the numbers: what they mean.”

“When you have mastered the numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers…You will be reading meaning.”

Geneen developed a reporting system extensively on numbers that served as a form of early warning system. Once a warning was raised, everything was thrown to fix it so that “unexpected shocks and surprises that accost everyone in life became manageable.”

See all the posts on Geneen’s book, Managing, by clicking on “Geneen” in the tag cloud, in the column on the right side.

Part 3 of Managing by Harold Geneen deals with the importance of facts, and just any facts, but unshakable facts.

To Geneen, an objective view of the facts was one of the most important aspects of successful management. People go wrong most often when their decisions are based upon inadequate knowledge of the available facts or when they lack sufficient facts altogether.

All facts are not created equal, however. Geneen points out these variations:

• Apparent facts
• Assumed facts
• Reported facts
• Hoped-for facts
• Facts so labeled and accepted as facts

“The highest art of professional management requires the literal ability to “smell” a “real fact” from all others—moreover to have the temerity, intellectual curiosity, guts and/or plain impoliteness, if necessary, to be sure that what you do have is indeed what we will call an “unshakable fact.”

See all the posts on Geneen’s book, Managing, by clicking on “Geneen” in the tag cloud, in the column on the right side.

Part 2 of Managing by Harold Geneen deals with the outcome of management, and that is performance.

Performance is Your Reality.

Performance is the basis of evaluating management. Geneen defined performance as growth and accomplishment over a protracted period of time in an ever-changing business world.

Not every problem can be solved. In this situation you change the business environment. You cannot continue accepting inadequate results and explaining them. “The acid test is not the explanation, however logical and reasonable. The test is whether or not you as a manage accept as satisfactory those unsatisfactory results, without doing enough about it.”

Performance does not come from a theory. You cannot run a business, or anything else, on a theory.  “We are always buying nostrums of some kind, even in business, where we call them concepts, because we are always looking for simple formulas that will solve our complex problems. Business theories are like that.”

On performance, Geneen and Drucker agree. “The function of management is to produce results.” And, “The ultimate test of management is performance.” (From The Daily Drucker.)

See all the posts on Geneen’s book, Managing, by clicking on “Geneen” in the tag cloud, in the column on the right side.

Part 1 of Managing by Harold Geneen deals with the purpose of management, and that is to manage.

MANAGEMENT MUST MANAGE

“Manage means that once you set your business plan and budget for the year, you must achieve the sales, the market share, the earnings, and whatever to which you committed yourself. If you don’t achieve those results, you’re not a manager.”

The operative word is “must” and means trying one action after another until the goal is achieved, even under harsh conditions.

Everyone is always working at legitimate cross-purposes, governed by self-interest. Boards, management, workers, vendors, competitors- all have their own agendas. The job of the manager is to manage all of that, and more,  “and to finish the year with results that satisfy those cross-purposes as well as the goals you set for yourself and your own company.”

“The only thing that counts is that the desired results were achieved or that they were not achieved.” What hurts business is that managers offer explanations and rationalizations for lack of achievement that are all too readily accepted.

See all the posts on Geneen’s book, Managing, by clicking on “Geneen” in the tag cloud, in the column on the right side.

Managing is the title of a book by Harold Geneen, legendary CEO of ITT. It was published in 1984, which makes it 26 years old. There is no chapter on Social Media and the term SEO (search engine optimization) wouldn’t be coined for almost two decades. Why bother with it, then, especially when Geneen states that “The secret of how to succeed in business…is that there is no secret. No theory.”

The answer is that Geneen captures the essence of business management. He does so simply and without the hype and hyperbole that infect many of today’s newest management books. I look forward to sharing its wisdom with you.

What books on business management do you recommend? Have they, too, stood the test of time?

See all the posts on Geneen’s book, Managing, by clicking on “Geneen” in the tag cloud, in the column on the right side.

Strategy And The Fat Smoker: Doing What is Obvious But Not Easy is the latest book by management consultant David Maister. Its premise is that most of us know what to do; the problem is doing it. For example, to lose weight, we know that we should eat less and exercise more. Yet, we don’t lose weight because we don’t do what we know should be done.

Similarly, we know that some of the best business environments occur when people work collaboratively in teams, where all team members are equally respected, and when each member feels like he or she is contributing to something important.

David Maister would be proud of the experience my wife and I had at Memorial Sloane-Kettering. Before each of my wife’s chemo treatments, an RN preped her with an IV and went through a series of questions. On this latest occasion, I asked Ann if she like working at Memorial.

You can tell one’s passion when they go beyond a yes or no response. Such was Ann’s response when said that she loved working here because of the team philosophy that allowed her to develop a close working relationship with the attending doctor (the doctor and nurse are teamed); this, in turn, allowed her regular contact with patients with whom she established a caring relationship. At Memorial, staff are eager – and not resistent – to help with small requests (an expanded notion of the team) and the MDs treat the RNs as equals.

Maister is so very right. We know what contributes to satisfaction in the workplace, and we can see it alive even in such potentially depressing places as a cancer hospital. The real challenge is to do it.