Growing Your Managerial Skills
by Tom Ehrenfeld
Books that can help bookstore owners become entrepreneurial managers
Bookstores are on the ropes, taking hits from a range of competitors.
Superstores have transformed consumer expectations, the Internet has destroyed
the advantages that once came with the territory and our Wal-Mart economy
continues to batter margins in every industry. Booksellers can respond
to these external challenges by growing their own managerial skills, using
some of the books on their own shelves.
New technologies, markets and consumer expectations will always be a
fact of life. What matters for bookstore owners and managers is how these
trends affect the discipline of management. In Innovation
and Entrepreneurship (HarperBusiness), Peter Drucker argues that real
innovation—and job creation through new markets and industries—occurs
only when people put new technology to work. More than a decade ago, Drucker
wrote, "The new technology is human management."
Today I believe that phrase would be entrepreneurial management. The
smartest startup veterans and the shrewdest managers behave in similar
ways: they spot and exploit opportunities by leveraging existing and available
resources, know-how and connections. They seek and harvest change by making
new connections where they didn't exist before. Finally, they strive to
improve their process literacy.
The Five Keys
Entrepreneurial managers create opportunities for growth in five key
areas. First, they create a sense of purpose by articulating the company's
goals and mission. Second, they leverage the potential of employees by
setting boundaries and discussing how to accomplish mutual goals. Third,
they bootstrap (i.e., leverage the output of their available resources)
on both a personal and organizational level. Fourth, they improve their
managerial ability through networking and benchmarking. And finally, they
create systems that enable the company to continue to realize its unique
and valuable promise, without their constant individual presence.
The following resources should help you cultivate your own managerial
mastery. Some give explicit instructions, while others are simply good
reads with more implicit lessons to share.
Mission
Built
to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and
Jerry Porras (HarperBusiness) is probably the best book about the importance
of using values and beliefs as a conscious compass for decision-making.
The authors show how "visionary companies" such as Sony, Disney and Hewlett-Packard
grew and prospered as a result of basing strategy and operations on a few
simple values. The critical point of this book is a sense of how explicit
organizational values and goals lead to long-term success.
For a more personal look at how certain companies grew by pursuing a
clearly defined mission, I would suggest several excellent business narratives.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's Pour
Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (Hyperion)
is a lovely explication of how the company's values translated into particular
operational choices such as giving front-line employees extensive training,
health plans and stock options. Going back a bit further, co-founder David
Packard of Hewlett-Packard shares terrific stories about his company's
use of values as a compass in The
HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company (HarperBusiness).
Mission statements are like business plans: the process matters as much
as the end result. The act of engaging employees to participate in articulating
the mission statement sends a message of empowerment and aligns the company
around common goals.
Setting Boundaries and Aligning Goals
The most effective way to manage employees is to hire the right ones.
While there are many books that help select the best people, my top pick
is 45
Effective Ways for Hiring Smart: How to Predict Winners and Losers in the
Incredibly Expensive People-Picking Game by Pierre Mornell (Ten Speed).
Once you have the right people on board, the challenge is to set realistic
goals, make expectations explicit and create a climate that encourages
productive accomplishment. The best book on turning around a toxic atmosphere
of entitlement is Judith Bardwick's Danger
in the Comfort Zone: From Boardroom to Mailroom—How to Break the Entitlement
Habit That's Killing American Business (Amacom). Bardwick is neither
cynical nor judgmental; she simply believes that managers must actively
and explicitly challenge employees to set goals, and then find ways to
mutually accomplish them. This book does a nice job of suggesting how to
follow through with this task.
The ability to talk, really talk to others, is a key managerial skill
that Bardwick fails to address. There are a handful of extremely useful
books that do encourage dialogue. Two in particular offer both theory and
practice, providing a clear and understandable set of practices for qualitatively
better talks. Difficult
Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce
Patton and Sheila Heen (Penguin) is probably the best of the lot, though
sometimes the vocabulary the authors create to communicate their ideas
is a bit annoying. Also helpful are Crucial
Conversation: Tools for Talking When the Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson,
Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler (McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books)
and Fierce
Conversations: Achieving Success in Work and in Life, One Conversation
at a Time by Susan Scott (Viking). Finally, the most ambitious, difficult,
and ultimately rewarding of the crop is Dialogue
and the Art of Thinking Together by William Isaacs (Doubleday).
Networking and Benchmarking
There's no bible on the topic of networking, one of those informal practices
that can be vastly improved through conscious and formal attempts at a
more systematic approach. The more I research this topic, the less comfortable
I am recommending any one title.
Having written on this topic, I can offer a few simple guidelines. First
off, take steps toward forming a personal network of three to five peers
or mentors who will help you develop professionally. Pick people you trust
and listen to what they say without becoming defensive. Choose people from
different industries who can help you focus on your process skills rather
than industry or store knowledge. Temper your guilt about asking others
for their help by offering your expertise to someone you believe you can
help. Teaching is often the best form of learning.
Finally, in the category of benchmarking, I would recommend Benchmarking
for Best Practices: Winning Through Innovative Adaptation by Christopher
Bogan (McGraw-Hill). Ask yourself: where can I learn the best practices
from other industries and apply them to mine? Try subscribing to a trade
publication in an industry that has no connection to yours. Or take a field
trip to Wal-Mart to study how front-line employees greet people. Observe
how Whole Foods Market stores display produce. Read Paco Underhill's excellent
Why
We Buy: The Science of Shopping (Touchstone) to learn how great store
design encourages customers to behave in certain ways. Get out of the store
and out of the box and learn from others.
Bootstrapping/Productivity
Bootstrapping is the label we give to entrepreneurs who somehow transform
the resources they have into a productive and profitable enterprise that
fuels its own growth. It means adding extreme value through resourceful
and imaginative use of the resources available to you. The best large organizations
continue this essential practice through productivity, innovation and execution.
Start on a personal level by finding ways to boost productivity. This
requires a conscious and systematic approach to how one works and to how
one can ratchet up output significantly. I highly recommend David Allen's
Getting
Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity (Penguin). His system
is simple, commonsensical and invaluable. Another book that has a tremendous
influence on many is Stephen R. Covey's The
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (S&S).
The next step in boosting productivity is applying this leverage to
progressively larger realms. Peter Drucker's The
Effective Executive (HarperBusiness) lays out the simple though profound
ways that executives can radically increase the value they add to their
organization.
Surprising and powerful new forms of management can occur when employees
know the company mission, understand their role in the business and are
coordinated by an owner/manager who designs systems to tap the full productivity
of the company. My favorite example is the growing practice of Open Book
Management (OBM), the systematic cultivation of company-wide financial
literacy. The idea is that when all the employees understand how the company
makes money and how their individual actions affect the bottom line, they
realize they are not merely permitted to make changes for the good; they
are expected to.
There are three terrific books on this topic. Managing
by the Numbers by Chuck Kremer and Ron Rizzuto with John Case (Perseus)
offers a clear and instructive breakdown of how to parse financial statements
and link them to managerial actions. This guide can help any employee.
The story of how Springfield Remanufacturing Company pioneered OBM is told
in the cult business book The
Great Game of Business, written by the company's CEO Jack Stack (Currency/Doubleday).
Last year Stack wrote another brilliant book on the further implications
of this practice, A
Stake in the Outcome: Building a Culture of Ownership for the Long-Term
Success of Your Business (Doubleday).
Managerial Systems
Your organization needs to continue to grow, thrive and deliver service
to customers without your constant presence. That's the fundamental message
of the helpful book The
E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber (HarperBusiness). You can help your
company realize its full promise by stepping back—shifting from being
a manager to a leader. And good leaders spend their time on the things
that matter most, the areas in which they alone can add the most value.
To accomplish this, you need an organization with systems that give individuals
the confidence, direction and permission to keep things running and thriving.
The mark of great managers is that they create great managers. Noel Tichy
shows how in his trenchant The
Leadership Engine (HarperBusiness).
Keeping it all together is discussed at length in one of last year's
best business books, Execution:
The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
(Crown), who show how the best leaders teach with a few simple habits.
They spend a disproportionate amount of time hiring and coaching the right
people. They make sure they develop ambitious strategies tied to their
particular strengths. And they stay sufficiently involved in operations
to ensure that people do what they say.
Final Thought
One final quotation from the best management writer and thinker ever,
Peter Drucker (from Management:
Tasks, Responsibilities, Purposes, HarperBusiness): "There is only
one definition of business purpose: to create a customer. It is the customer
who determines what a business is. The customer alone is the foundation
of a business and keeps it in existence. He alone gives employment."
Reprinted with permission of the author, Tom
Ehrenfeld
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