Management Consulting

Many successful managers want to transition from management to leadership—but have no idea how. This book provides a well-lit pathway—a paradigm—for transforming yourself from manager to leader. By implementing 23 time-tested and easy-to-remember truths, managers can become leaders. These wisdoms are grouped into six core competencies that every leader-to-be must master: Focusing, Leading, Actioning, Philosophizing, Learning, and Caring.

So just exactly what is innovation? It turns out that innovation is doing something new. It can be a new method, a new idea, or even a new product. In the world of IT, we have the ability to solve just about any problem. However, how we go about solving problems can become outdated quickly. What we need to do as CIOs is to find out how to bring the spirit of innovation into our IT departments.

In order for any IT manager to be a success, the team that you are managing has to learn how to work together. All too often what IT managers don't realize is that your team may not know how to work together and they are going to need you to show them how to do this.

An IT manager is only as good as his or her team is. This means that one of the most critical skills that an IT manager has is the ability to build the perfect team. The better a team that you can build, the better your team is going to make you look!

In order to be successful as an IT manager, you need to be able to show the company that under your leadership your team is able to deliver high quality products on time and under budget. If you want to have any chance of being able to pull this off, then you are going to have to discover ways to build a high performance IT team.

Leadership is one of those things that we all think that we know what it is, but we are hard pressed to describe it to someone if they ask us. This makes picking the next generation of leaders that much harder. We want them to have the leadership skills that we know that they need, but how can we make sure that they have them? Some IT managers revert to using the time-tested trial-by-fire approach, but is this really the best way?

There are a lot of bad guys out there. For some odd reason, a lot of them seem to want to break into your company's networks and applications. As the CIO, it's your job to make sure that this does not happen. As much as we like to spend our time looking outwards in order to detect the next threat that our company may be facing, perhaps we're looking in the wrong direction. Just as important may be the insider threat that lurks within the company. No matter where it comes from, cybercrime is your problem to deal with.

Inspired Manufacturing Leadership answers the question of how to systematically incorporate Kaizen, metric management, problem solving, people development, culture change, and many more improvement efforts into one cohesive system of implementation. It reveals to leaders how to effectively and systematically challenge all processes having them to become predictable and repeatable. Once implemented, it facilitates the achievement of breakthrough results.

All too often CIOs can get caught up in all of the technical details of the job: boosting uptime, replacing servers, guarding against cyber criminals, etc. What we tend to forget is that IT exists to serve the rest of the business and they are there (in most cases) to make money. This means that there needs to be a business side to IT and that is one of a CIO's key responsibilities.

As an IT manager, one of your most valuable possessions is your career. At your firm, you are the only person who is going to be spending any time worrying about your career: how's it going, what is your next step, what could you be doing better? These are all vital questions for you to be able to answer if you want to advance in your career.

Project Management: Influence and Leadership includes three proven fundamentals to unlock the secrets of leadership, influence, and stakeholder communication management! Imagine that you master the magic of influence and are able to successfully lead and manage stakeholders. Imagine that you have a clear path of how to accomplish it.

As an IT manager you understand the value of technology. It's what provides our teams with the tools that we can use to accomplish great things for our company. The challenge that we run into is that technology is always changing. This means that as an IT manager you have a responsibility to stay on top of all of the various technologies that your team will be called on to make use of.

Who was it that said "It takes a village…"? They may not have been talking about being a product manager, but they might as well have been. Life has become so complex that product managers can no longer make their product a success just by their own efforts. Today it takes the help of one or more partners to get your product to where it needs to be. Are you going to be ready to work with those partners?

Any manager is only as good as his or her team. I'm pretty sure that we've all heard this before. However, that leaves us in a bit of a bind - more often than not we are just handed a team and told the make the most of them. However, it turns out that over time we have the ability to reshape and mold our team based on who we choose to add and remove from it. Learning how to do this the right way is what can determine the ultimate success of a manager.

As product managers, we all want to become better at what we do. However, sometimes we can find ourselves in a rut: we've solved the immediate problems, our product is doing well, and we've just lost that drive that we need in order to reach the next level. This is when the power of competition comes in. We all like a good challenge. When we are faced with a situation in which we might not be the best, or we might not know exactly what we should do, that's when we can become our best.

How do you measure the success of a product manager? Ultimately it comes down to how successful their product is. The more units that get sold to customers who have decided that your product is what they really need, the better job you have done in creating a solution to your customer's problems.

Product failures are never something that a product manager wants to talk about. We all live with the secret dread that someday the product that we are responsible for might turn out to be a failure. It turns out that we're all missing an important learning opportunity. Products do fail, and they end up failing for a wide range of reasons. Every product failure is loaded with fantastic learning opportunities for product managers. We just need to take the time and open our eyes to see what we can learn from each failure.

As individuals we have a tendency to shy away from getting involved in arguments. We view them as being confrontational and filled with emotions. However, when it comes to negotiating and when we have a different view of the world than the other side of the table, it turns out that a little bit of arguing might be just what the doctor ordered.

The art of negotiation depends on your ability to successfully communicate with the other side of the table. An important part of this communication is your ability to signal to the other side what your intentions are. Likewise, they will be signaling to you what they want to accomplish.

This authoritative volume on human resource management is highly recommended reading for the small business owners and HR professionals. Written by an acknowledged expert in all areas of business management, Recruiting and Hiring Effective Employees Made Simple is a well-organized guide to understanding this vitally important area of your business.