The book In Search of Excellence (by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman) mentions work by Stanford’s Harold Leavitt on the management process. According to Leavitt, the managing process is an interactive flow of three variables:

• path finding
• decision making
• implementation

At the time of writing, 1982, the focus on management was rational and analytic approaches to decision making. The other two variables being neglected by so called professional managers.

To provide example, several types of people were associated with each category.

Path Finding: poets, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders who have put their personal stamp on some business.

Decision Making: systems analysts, engineers, MBAs, statisticians, and professional managers.

Implementation: psychologists, salesmen, teachers, social workers, and most Japanese managers — essentially those who get their kicks from working with other people.

The obvious point from all of this is that a manager needs a broad spread of skills across all of these areas. To be successful as a manager implies a generalist approach, with skills in many diverse areas, a focus on people and the ability to execute ideas — a Renaissance Man (or person in modern parlance).

John Hagel has a brilliant summary of talent acquisition and how to avoid talent drain.

… we are seeing a new rationale for the firm emerge – firms exist to accelerate talent development. This is increasingly the reason why people choose to affiliate with firms.

The winners in the global economy will be the firms that can find ways to break this vicious cycle and harness network effects for talent development both within and across firms.

Some of the areas covered include:

1. Attract and retain vs. develop.
2. Training vs. learning.
3. Attract and retain vs. access and motivate.
4. Automation vs. amplification.
5. Strategic importance of growth.

I highly recommend reading the whole article. John doesn’t post often, and when he does it is something insightful - well worth adding the RSS feed.

I’ve blogged about management before, and still don’t have any answers. What I do have, is a range of ways of improving.

1. Mentoring — Learn from others.

   You don’t need to have a formal mentor relationship; you don’t even need someone’s permission to learn from them. What you need is to identify one or more people who have managed you well, or who you respect the way they manage others.

   Spent time with these people!

   Odds are, someone who is good at managing people, is happy to receive help. Offer to help out. Show interest in their problems and, most importantly, how they deal with them. Offer suggestions. You will learn in spite of yourself, just don’t expect to be right most of the time.

   If you aren’t in a position to offer suggestions, at least think of decisions you would make in a similar situation, and why. You may not always agree with the resultant decision, and it is worth investigating why you differ. Mentors are human too, and you can learn from their mistakes as well as your own.

2. History — You are not the first.

   People have gone before you, some were good, some were bad, many wrote books. Find them.

   Your mentors may be able to recommend people to start with. Read blogs of people you respect, and find out who they recommend.

   If in doubt, start with Peter Drucker.

   Another good approach is to check the references and notes sections of management or business books you are reading. If there is a key point that resonates with you, often there is another book or article waiting in the wings to expand your knowledge.

3. Current practices — Things change.

   Management continues to evolve in terms of what works. New theories come and go. Changing dynamics of the work force introduces new challenges. Keep up to date on current thinking.

   Books are a good source of knowledge for this. Try and find books recommended by others.

   One that I’ve found useful recently is Evidence Based Management. The key thing from this book is a way of filtering out other business related knowledge.

   Business magazines may assist with current trends. This is not a path I’ve followed. Although, I do read the Economist - a magazine that does a good job of tracking the business world as well as world events.

   Blogs provide lots of opinion on a range of current topics. Subscribe to ones that interest you, and also subscribe to ones that challenge you.

4. Experience — Learn by doing.

   Whether your are in an official position of management or simply working in a team, try out what you’ve learnt. You will make mistakes, it is part of the process. The aim is to learn from your previous experiences, be they successful or not.

   Volunteer for tasks outside your normal scope of work that will allow you to develop. This provides a good way of gaining a range of experience in more than just your domain. The experiences will help you in your own domain.

5. Diversity — management is all about people. All the theory and best practices in the world won’t help if you can’t work with people.

   Spend time having interests outside of work, you will become more approachable. More importantly, spend time finding out what other people’s interests are.

   A clichéd book perhaps, but Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People is the definitive book on interacting with others.

6. Podcasts — A free lunch.

   With the advent of podcasting, people are giving away knowledge. You can listen to interviews with founders of successful companies, lectures from the best universities and a constant stream of news.

   The following podcasts I’ve found useful and inspiring, ordered roughly in terms of utility:

   • Stanford - lecture series on entrepreneurship, that covers leadership and management.

   • Venture Voice - interview series that covers how business owners manage their companies and the people who work for them.

   • Harvard - bi-weekly broadcast that covers topical areas in business, including reviews of recently released books.

   • 12 Byzantine Rulers - history of how the leaders of the Byzantine empire dealt with the management of the entire empire. Provides a good historical perspective.

   • Knowledge@Wharton - another business news podcast from the business school at Wharton.

For a closing truism — the more you learn, the more you’ll know, thus the more effective you’ll become. Stay open to learning new things, however you learn them.

If you have an experience to share, or an avenue of knowledge that has worked for you, please leave a comment.

From Seth:

If marketing is the art of spreading ideas, then teaching is a kind of marketing.

Atex is a company that understands this very well.

They make a very complex and hard to understand set of products. Training is kept as an in-house competency. In fact, training is often included for a select group of key staff within a newspaper as part of the pre-sales process. The training isn’t conducted by an outsourced company, or by a junior employee, but by the best expert available on the system.

This makes the sales process much smoother, as the customer now understands the product and the value that the product brings to their business.

Do not underestimate the value of training, it may just help close your next deal!

Bonus Links (both from Creating Passionate Users):

• You can out-spend or out-teach - “The most important skill today is… teaching”
• You ARE a marketer. Deal with it. - “You’re in marketing. Now go kill yourself.”

To be sure, people who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs. But such people are unlikely to do well in a host of other activities as well …

In all such persuits decisions have to be made, and the essence of any decision is uncertainty.

But everyone who can face up to decision making can learn to be an entrepreneur and to behave entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.

- Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1985