Just Add Management: Seven Steps to Creating a Productive Workplace and Motivating Your Employees In Challenging Times

By Farzad Dibachi, Rhonda Dibachi, Rhonda Love Dibachi

Book Overview

A practical guide to reigning in a workforce unbridled by ineffectual loose management and to getting employees back on track. It offers managers a system for creating a professional, businesslike... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071408002
• ISBN13: 9780071408004
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 229 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Great Guidelines for Running a Knowledge Organization

This book gives a basic outline of what a person needs to do in order to run a knowledge organization. This outline is called the "Accountability Management System", and it describes a set of seven principles that allow managers to gain visibility into their organization. These principles start off fairly broad and philosophical, the first one is: "Your job exists to make this company a success". These first three principles are quickly detailed, they describe the type of culture that is necessary upon which can be built a successful knowledge organization. The remaining four principles are more tactical, and therein lies the real meat and real value of the book. These last four principles include commonly used management tools, but the authors go into a great amount of detail discussing why and howthey should be applied to the knowledge organization. These four principles are portfolio management, program management, time tracking and knowledge management. Many, many books have been written on each one of these topics, but Just Add Management focuses on how to use these tools in a knowledge organization. They are all described with many examples and succinct descriptions on how to implement these concepts. Using these principles, the book ties them all together, and shows how all of these tools, working together, can bring visibility to management. They reinforce each other, and ensure that the organization is using the knowledge of all of its people.

A Knowledge Management How To

The authors discuss their ideas about knowledge management. It is a field that I have been interested in for over 10 years. How can you encode and re-use knowledge in an organization? Can you package knowledge? Can you catalog it? Or does the act of writing down knowledge succeed only in capturing a shadow of its true worth? The authors describe the type of organization that is most likely to be able to foster the creation and re-use of knowledge. They argue that knowledge can be stored for re-use, but this is only possible if there is a predefined context for that knowledge. Like a Library?s Dewey Decimal system, the authors describe a system that gives everyone in an organization the context for storing and re-using knowledge. This system, which they coin the Accountability Management System, can give everyone a common reference for knowledge work. They include portfolio management to provide everyone with a prioritized framework for important activities, process management to provide everyone with a set of suggested guidelines for common activities and how to report progress, time tracking (which the authors call progress tracking) to measure progress, and finally, knowledge management to determine how to treat the bits of knowledge that are encountered. Here the authors go into a bit a detail, since this is the centerpiece of the book. They note the two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, and they emphasize that they must be handled differently. Explicit knowledge can be stored, and so you should do so in process descriptions or guidelines or work templates. Tacit knowledge is much more valuable but it cannot be stored, and so you must work to spark its creation. This, the authors say, you can only do through getting people together to share and collaborate. They give many examples and case studies to show how to do this. This book clearly shows how to use an organization?s most precious asset: its knowledge. It describes what knowledge is, how to use it and how to create more of it.

Great information for managers

I have been managed by many people, some good, some not so good. The best managers were the ones who knew when to guide me and when to shut up and leave me alone. The worst managers were the ones who regulated my day down to the tiniest little detail. Almost as bad were the ones who gave me so much freedom that I had no idea what they wanted. Now that I am a manager, I am trying to understand what is too much freedom and what is too much control. Countless management books exist on this subject - some simple, some complex. Many management consultants talk a lot about this. But this little book seems to explain this important concept to the average person with more humor and grace then I have seen before.This book takes pride of place on my bookshelf.

Great Advice

This is great advice for any manager, how to keep people in line, but still let them be creative and do their thing.

Tons of useful information

As a program manager, I have to keep tabs on lots of people who do not report directly to me. Many times, these people resent my asking, "how's it going, are you on schedule"? I need this information, because everyone needs to know the program schedule and I also need to report schedule updates to my VP's. I was having lots of problems getting the right information from people. This book helped me understand how to get the information I needed, yet still be on speaking terms with everyone! It told me what kinds of information needs to get gathered when, and what formats to use for gathering, and how to report schedule updates to my VP's. It gave me timetables and worksheets and lots of other useful tools. If need to work with lots of people and keep tabs on them, then I really recommend this book.