MyBookReview

I’m sure any one who had the experience of leading a team, wished that he or she could do everything?  Normally team members give you more headache than the task itself.  In this book, it shows you how to build a team.  Building a great team means that together, you can accomplish the task.

The book provides you with the skills to choose the right people for the right roles, complementing each other and combining skills to create a winning team spirit. The book will tell you how to identify and therefore avoid problematic people to be in the team.  Problem people such as the daydreamer, the loner, the sulker, the secretive person, the uncommunicative person and many more.  You will learn to inspire and to motivate members with the appropriate rewards.

Building team spirit includes the following techniques:

• Enourage team members to support each other.
• Train the team together.
• Put different people in charge of different projects.
• Give your team confidential information.
• Treat everyone as part of the team.

This is a great book to have if you are managing project teams.

About the book:

This is a book about leadership not literary naked in a sense.  This books aims to strip away the myth and mystery, the jargon and the hype to make personal and professional success a matter of choice.  At the end of each chapter, you are given choices.  You may follow the choice you made or you can read this book in a conventional way.  But I can tell this book is non-conventional.

I’ve been to many meetings,  all sorts of meetings.  The kinds of meetings that I dread most is the long-winded and boring ones.  A heated one is interesting and dramatic as long as you’re not the one in the firing line. In one section of the book, it tells about influence in company meetings (boring or otherwise).  No matter how it is conducted, one should always utilise meetings to build rapport and to get to know your peers better.  Seating is important too.  If you want to provide some influence to the chairman, seat either to right or to the left of the chairman because the chairman tends to confide in the persons seat next to him/her.  If you are seated in the opposite side, you may risk getting into conflict.  This is just one of tips in the book. There are many more.

I recommend this book if you’re management level or in a position of influence.

About the book:

Paperback
The Naked Leader
Authored by David Taylor
Published by Bantam Books, 2003
ISBN 0553815652
351 pages

One of my favourite comic is Dilbert a character created by Scott Adams.  Dilbert has a dog called Dogbert, whom I believe is Dilbert’s alter ego.  Anyways this book is basically a satire on management techniques.  I like this book because it is funny and witty but yet plausible sometimes.  Although I wouldn’t recommend one to take this book seriously and literally because you might end up in trouble if you’re management level.

The book provides illustrations in classic Scott Adams way. Dogbert reveals the many vital skills needed by managers in their daily lives, including:

• Pretending to care - learn how to hear without listening!
• Competition - experience the joy of setting your people agains on another!
• Making decisions - be a leader without making any decisions!
• Incentives - inspire employees by giving them worthless knicknacks!

About the book:

I’m sure everybody has gone through an unpleasant situation where you just don’t seem to move forward. Well, help is available with a book titled UNSTUCK. Yes that’s exactly the title.  The book was authored by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro.  Basically there are six elements that you need to unify and keep in balance to prevent yourself from getting stuck in the first place.  The six elements are :

1. Your Purpose
2. Your Strategy
3. Your people and the way they interact
4. Your structure and process
5. Your metrics and rewards
6. Your culture

A majority of “stucks” results from at least one of these causes: Overwhelmed, Exhausted, Directionless, Hopeless, Battle-torn, Worthless and Alone.  The causes are known as the Serious Seven.  Knowing which one you fall into, will determine the next course of action on how to recover and put the system in balance again.

This book is useful for managers and even individuals.

About the book:

Do you ever find yourself having to accomplish many tasks simultaneously?  I’ve been in that situation for most of my working years.  Yes it is certainly a pain to do just that.  Your stress level will surely increase.  But I take things positively, by that I learn alot and also “grow” rapidly. Concidentally your stress tolerance level increases.  Sometimes I scare myself and what more my staff.

Anyways this book titled Managing Multiple Projects written by Irene and Michael Tobis helps you to see the big picture, sustain productivity and meet commitments reliably.   The books states,  as a manager you need to be a master juggler, responsible for keeping several balls in the air even as new balls are randomly tossed in from all sides. Very true.  You will never know what’s coming to you.  So this book really tells you the techniques to handle all this…sometimes prioritization doesn’t work as you may not know the load of task that you have committed.  Therefore you may become overloaded if you have already committed to the tasks, whether you know it or not.  So it is very important to know beforehand the current load of your teams’ tasks before committing.

Knowing the big picture is important too.  As a leader you need to see where or to what your projects are leading to.  By that you may know how to assign and managed assigned tasks. Ideally, each team member should reach 100% productivity capacity.  But that’s not always the case.

I like the book as it is simple, with a lot of tips.  I recommend this book if you are managing a team and have lots of tasks to accomplish.

About the Book:

Managing Multiple Projects
Authored by Irene Tobis and Michael Tobis
Published by McGrawHill
ISBN 0071388966
212 pages

See also:  Book Review on Google books