part four

Succeeding

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

The genesis of this book was experiencing failure and learning from it, a compelling enough theme on its own, particularly as it is such a neglected one. It is important. We can understand a great deal from it. But if that’s all then what I have written and observed would be an account, hopefully a persuasive and graphic account, of what not to do, what to avoid, negative management commandments.

But I realised that you can’t really say what not to do without having a strong and sound implicit idea of what to do. Avoiding failure and getting out of it require positive management behaviours. I have described many of these in previous chapters. They are the essence of good management, the opposite of failure. In the remainder of this book I put these positives together and propose a different management approach. I argue that good managers are catalysts, pathway finders and releasers of potential.

In setting out my stall, I will help readers gauge what difference my approach can make to what they can achieve and also what it cannot do, because knowing the limits of your own approach is the key to success. My approach really does help managers not just to have success but to be enduringly successful.

And it really can be embedded so that it survives changes of personnel. In some cases, it has survived people changing around me, and in other cases, it has survived my own departure. It works and it lasts. And its principles are relevant to everyone. It is not specifically aimed at those who wish to scale the towering heights of management, though they probably won’t scale them unless they do understand it. It is about how organisations work, and understanding that will make any manager a better manager. It is management for every man and every woman.