2.1 KiB
+++ title = "The Manager's Answer Book - Barbara Mitchell, Cornelia Gamlem" date = 2021-08-25
[taxonomies] tags = ["reviews", "books", "books:2021", "management"] +++
OpenLibrary Summary: Powerful Tools to Maximize Your Impact and Influence, Build Trust and Teams, and Respond to Challenges
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Honestly, I didn't finish reading the book.
First, the style of showing content by the way of questions doesn't quite fit the way I read, specially when the questions are specially designed to provide an answer -- and not the other way around.
Second, most of the answers are quite obvious, in the style "How can I manage X?" with the answer "Ask the people who were doing it in the first". Well, duh.
Third, the question style is somewhat confusing. It uses the pattern of "I read/saw/heard about X. What can I do about it?", with different styles of X. There are even questions which one could almost say are non-sequiturs, like (paraphrasing) "I'm a highly hands-on person, how can I write the reports the financial team is asking me?". You can be both, and none of those two are actually related.
Fourth, there are a bunch of useless comments in the middle, which gives the impression of filler, like "As a manager, you have to do several things." No shit, Sherlock.
And fifth, by 75% of the book, there was a question about what one should report and I quote "Evidence of union activity should be reported to your human resources or legal support as soon as possible. Early detection of and rapid response to union activity has long been key to union avoidance." So, if I get this right, it means that me, as a manager, should be a union busting asshole? Fuck. Off.
That's when I gave up. I was already tired of the style and then, instead of suggesting speaking to people invested in it to check why they believe an union is necessary or what could be done to avoid the creation of the union in the first place. But no, you must report to legal so they can burst the whole thing down. Great, what a great person you've become.