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OWL BOOK REVIEW
AVIARY
Buckingham, Marcus
and Curt Coffman. First, Break All the Rules, What the World's Greatest
Managers do Differently.
New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85286-1
Both from the Gallup
organization, authors Buckingham and Coffman have worked with data collected
over a period of twenty-five years to identify the characteristics of great
managers and great workplaces.
Based on all this
data, they make the fundamental point that great organizations have great
front-line managers.
The authors ask four
questions of the data. In their own words:
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What will talented employees
always need?
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What will great managers
always do to turn talent into performance?
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What are the enduring
secrets to finding, focusing, and keeping talented employees?
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What are the constants?
This is a very
difficult book to review, not because it lacks content. In fact, its enormous
amount of content is what makes it difficult to review. The best we can
do is to suggest a procedure for reading it.
This is a book about
managerial style, and most people who read it will gain insight from approaching
it as a series of lessons. The seven chapters are divided into 37 short
sections, so they are easy to go through a few minutes at a time.
Our recommendation
is that you read it a lesson per week. Make up an action plan for yourself
based on each section and watch yourself begin to change as you break all
the rules!
This is definitely
a book that should sit on a manager's bookshelf for a long time, read and
then reread.
Janelle Barlow, Ph.D.
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