Just Add Management: Seven Steps to Creating a Productive Workplace, Motivated Employees and a Healthy Bottom Line - Hardcover

Dibachi, Farzad; Dibachi, Rhonda

9780071408004: Just Add Management: Seven Steps to Creating a Productive Workplace, Motivated Employees and a Healthy Bottom Line

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071408002 ISBN 13: 9780071408004

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Inc.,US, 2002

Remember this one? In an effort to hire the best talent and unleash the innovation in your workforce, put these creative people in an open and flexible work environment, set them up with the latest technology, and encourage them to think outside the box - the next-generation company would emerge. Well, guess what? This idea, that magazines like Fast Company and Industry Standard drooled over, turned out to be complete bunk. In company after company, managers learned that taking a hands-off approach to their workers doesn't work. Managers don't know what their people are doing all day; they can't trust internal schedules and forecasts, and when it's time to belt-tighten, their teams cannot give them a good accounting of whether projects are adequately staffed, on track, or on time. Getting Back to Accountability offers a solution: you want profitability? Get the suits out from storage and hold your employees accountable for the work they do. The Dibachis show you how to create a professional, businesslike work environment where knowledge is democratic, but lines of authority are clear. It is the manual for building value by putting your employees back to work. The book will help managers improve productivity with a four-step approach to organizing their efforts: setting priorities, aligning projects with those priorities, setting and enforcing processes, and progres-tracking. The authors are founders of Niku Corporation, a company that used the system in this book to thrive in Silicon Valley, while many of their peers have failed. Farzad Dibachi is frequently quoted in The New York Times, WSJ, Fortune and appears frequently on CNN and CNBC. Joan Dibachi is Executive VP of Planning and Strategy at Niku, and previously worked at Ernst & Young and GE.

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From the Back Cover:

It's time to get back to business real business. A decade of hands-off management has produced a stream of cost overruns, incomplete projects, and reduced productivity, not to mention a growing list of accounting scandals. Companies that prided themselves on thinking outside the box have been boxed in by their neglect of basic business processes and a failure to insist on accountability and quantifiable results.

In Just Add Management Farzad and Rhonda Love Dibachi reveal that the technological advances of the past decade actually have brought most business organizations to the brink of a major productivity breakthrough. In order to leap the final hurdle, however, managers must find ways to set the priorities, track the progress, and measure the productivity of knowledge workers.

This step-by-step guide to managing knowledge workers explores the realities and myths of today's knowledge workplace, introduces the archetypes who populate it, and shows managers how to set the right tone in the office for every employee every day. It demonstrates ways in which managers can establish transparency the state in which every member of the enterprise understands his or her role in the larger scheme and how that role influences the success of the entire organization.

The authors introduce time-tested, proven management techniques that enable managers to set and broadcast priorities, agree upon and enforce processes, and track and monitor employees' progress and accountability. They also show managers how to support this accountability management system with knowledge tools that provide accurate, timely business data in order to help organizations work smarter. These techniques provide the mechanics of visibility data-driven insight into which employees are doing what and how well they are doing.

Without the oversight of mature, focused managers who stress business fundamentals and organizational goals, all of the technological breakthroughs of the past decade are just expensive toys for technocrats and computer mavens. Just Add Management gives businesses and managers the tools and techniques they need to take control of the knowledge workplace, put their operations back on track, and make the next leap forward in productivity and profitability.

"Just Add Management marries solid, up-to-date productivity techniques with a mature, common-sense message refreshing to any manager. As the Dibachis argue, being smart is not enough. To succeed today you have to have effective, accountable, repeatable processes. This is a concise, well-written guide to getting them, and it's also a lot of fun to read." Maynard Webb, Chief Operating Officer, eBay

Proven techniques for managing the knowledge workplace

What do Amadeus the artiste, the "just-do-it" Jock, and Darth Maul the Sith Lord have in common? They are three of the archetypes who populate the knowledge workplace talented, even brilliant workers who can nevertheless drive managers to distraction with their resistance to meeting deadlines, quantifying progress, and demonstrating tangible results. When managed properly, however, these three and others like them can be enormously innovative and productive.

Just Add Management gives managers the tools and techniques they need to provide the "adult supervision" that transforms the knowledge workplace from an expensive playground for overgrown kids into a profit center that powers progress, promotes productivity, and achieves enterprisewide objectives on time and on budget. Using proven, time-tested management techniques, this indispensable guide shows managers how to:

-Demand accountability and maturity from workers
-Organize the knowledge workplace for consistency, efficiency, and predictability
-Establish workplace transparency
-Set and broadcast priorities
-Track progress on every project every day
-Gather accurate, timely business data that help the organization work smarter

What's the secret ingredient your organization needs to turbocharge the knowledge workplace, boost productivity, and take the next leap forward in profitability? Just Add Management!

About the Author:

Farzad Dibachi is founder and chief executive of Niku, and is a well-known Silicon Valley businessman who has appeared on the covers of Upside and Red Herring. He has also appeared in Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, New York Times, Business Week and Newsweek. Prior to Niku, he was the youngest VP in Oracle's history. He is a frequent speaker at industry events such as Oracle users week, Project Leadership Conference, and Business Week conferences. Rhonda Dibachi is executive VP of Strategy and Planning at Niku.

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