The Bluffer's Guide® to Management; Bluff Your Way® in Management

by John Courtis

• ISBN13: 9781902825526
• ISBN10: 1902825527
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-05-28
• Publisher: Oval Books
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

Summary

A snappy little book containing facts, jargon, and inside information--all that readers need to know to hold their own among the experts.

Author Biography

John Courtis is ideally placed to write about bluffing in management. He has been doing it for years. He qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1959 (which conferred absolutely no management competence whatsoever) and was promptly commissioned in the Royal Air Force, spending most of the next three years as accountant officer of a Fighter Command unit on a very remote island. He survived through the good offices of two brilliant sergeants and a devious corporal (see Delegation). From 1962 until 1967 he was on the finance staff of Ford of Britain, where the foundations of his management skills were laid, mostly by observing others' mistakes. Since then he has been offered (and has accepted) directorships in: Reed Executive Ltd (management selection) Attitude Surveys Ltd (employee communications) Executive Appointments Ltd (headhunting) Deeko plc (manufacturing) The common factor in all these was that at the time he joined each board he knew virtually nothing about its business. He assures us that he has learned something since. He remains head of Courtis & Partners, a selection firm which he does know something about.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 5
Management Functions	p. 7
Making Decisions	p. 7
Controlling	p. 8
Planning	p. 9
Meetings	p. 9
Instructing	p. 10
Communicating	p. 10
Managing Time	p. 11
Accounting	p. 12
Analysing Variances	p. 13
Financing	p. 14
Recruiting	p. 15
Advertising	p. 15
Procurement	p. 16
Delegation	p. 16
Manufacturing	p. 17
Pricing	p. 17
Exporting	p. 17
Leadership	p. 18
Having to Manage	p. 19
People in Management	p. 20
Accountants	p. 20
Executives	p. 21
Chairmen	p. 21
Directors	p. 22
Marketing People	p. 22
Analysts	p. 23
Salesmen	p. 24
P.A.s	p. 25
Facets of Management	p. 26
Management Styles	p. 37
Management Good and Bad	p. 42
Seven Deadly Sins	p. 43
The Outside World	p. 47
Actuaries	p. 47
Bankers	p. 48
Unions	p. 48
Headhunters	p. 48
Journalists	p. 51
Business Graduates	p. 51
Management Literature	p. 52
Gurus and Good Names	p. 53
Jargon	p. 57
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Good management
The secret of good management is avoiding bad management. Similarly, the test of good managers is that they cannot be observed or remembered for the deviations and idiosyncrasies which make bad managers so memorable.

Real management
The acid test of the true manager under pressure is that he or she is the only one not immediately doing something. The real manager is thinking before acting. Even if it's only a bluff.

Proper management
If you devote even a fragment of the working day to some thought about managing properly you can rise above the norm.

Right management
Good management is not necessarily about flair or excellence. It may often be about getting things right more than 90 per cent of the time, by avoiding the crass errors of your contemporaries.

Simple management
Good managers have every right to insist that presentations of all kinds, within and without the organisation, be presented in words of few syllables which a child of four could understand.

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Excerpted from The Bluffer's Guide to Management: Bluff Your Way in Management by John Courtis
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.