List of Figures and TablesList of CasesPreface and Acknowledgments1: Introduction2: Setting the Scene3: Patterns of Conflict Management in Thirteen Executive Contexts4: Modern Times: Authoritative Conflict Management in a Mechanistic Bureaucracy5: Silent Hives: Minimalistic Conflict Management in an Atomistic Organization6: Brave New World: Reciprocal Conflict Management in a Matrix System7: Conclusion: Orthodoxy, Change, and IdentityAppendix A: Anatomy of an Ethnography of Business ElitesAppendix B: Aggregate Comparative DataAppendix C: Glossary of Native Terms at PlaycoNotesReferencesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The measure of the executive, Peter Drucker reminds us, is the ability to 'get the right things done'. Usually this involves doing what other people have overlooked, as well as avoiding what is unproductive. He identifies five talents as essential to effectiveness, and these can be learned; in fact, they must be learned just as scales must be mastered by every piano student regardless of his natural gifts. Intelligence, imagination and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that convert these into results. One of the talents is the management of time. Another is choosing what to contribute to the particular organization. A third is knowing where and how to apply your strength to best effect. Fourth is setting up the right priorities. And all of them must be knitted together by effective decision-making. How these can be developed forms the main body of the book. The author ranges widely through the annals of business and government to demonstrate the distinctive skill of the executive. He turns familiar experience upside down to see it in new perspective. The book is full of surprises, with its fresh insights into old and seemingly trite situations.

Strong managerial leadership is a major factor in competitiveness and effectiveness in business. Companies must establish a managerial organization structure that puts competent managerial leaders into suitable roles. The aim of this practical text is to provide a foundation for leadership at a down-to-earth and understandable level.

Nineteen experts examine research-based theories and current practices in highly successful enterprises, and explain how you can adopt effective, state-of-the-art methods to integrate your talent management functions. People are the most important asset in any organization, yet managing talent as a cohesive strategy is surprisingly rare. Far too many organizations are stuck in the tradition of letting human resource "silos" separate the components of talent management, rather than encouraging communication, cooperation, and effective integration of these functions. The Executive Guide to Integrated Talent Management paves the way to integrated talent management by assembling the collective experience and insight of 19 experts who examine research-based theories and current practices in highly successful enterprises. These contributors (including Marshall Goldsmith, Peter Cappelli, Leslie Joyce, and Edward E. Lawler, among others) provide practical advice about how you can adopt effective, state-of-the-art methods in your own organization. You'll benefit from the different perspectives of these world-renowned thought leaders and practitioners as they explain how to develop a comprehensive strategy that aligns big-picture organizational goals with the challenges of finding and keeping talent. You'll also learn firsthand about the best practices of corporations like 3M, Agilent, GE, Hertz, Cisco, and others who have pioneered efforts to make their organizations perform better through people.

In his sixty-five-year consulting career, Peter F. Drucker, widely regarded as the father of modern management, identified eight practices that can make any executive effective. Leadership is not about charisma or extroversion. It’s about these practices: Effective executives ask, “What needs to be done?” They also ask, “What is right for the enterprise?” They develop action plans. They take responsibility for decisions. They take responsibility for communicating. They focus on opportunities rather than problems. They run productive meetings. And they think and say “we” rather than “I.” Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

What do economists know that business executives find useful? Economics ought to be indispensable for business decision-makers because it deals with the issues executives face daily: what to pro duce, how and how much, at what price, how best to use resources (time, labor, capital), how to understand markets. Why, then, do managers often think that economists' theories are ivory-tower and impractical? Perhaps because most economics texts are mystifying, jargon-rid den, and written from every perspective except that of the line manager. In Executive Economics: Ten Essential Tools for Managers, Shlomo Maital brings economics down to earth, back to the hard day-to-day decisions that executives have to make. He shows how all decisions can be organized around two key questions: What is it worth? What must I give up to get it? Answering these questions depends upon finding and maintaining the right relation in the "triangle of profit" -- cost, price, and value. Each of Executive Economics ten chapters focuses on one or more legs of the triangle of profit, defines a decision tool, and illustrates how it can be used to improve the quality of executive decisions. Drawing on recent examples from both Fortune 500 firms and smaller companies, Maital shows why economics main contribution is to deepen executives' understanding of the structure of their costs, and to explain why some of a business's highest expenses are those that never appear on a check stub or in a profit-and-loss statement. Executive Economics is written for executives, about executives, and by an author who has both taught executives at MIT's Sloan School of Management for over a decade and served as a consultant to small and large businesses. It is must reading for executives who need simple, effective decision-making tools to give them an edge in today's competitive global economy.