Business: Books

As managers, senior executives, and CEOs all over have painfully discovered, if you don’t manage for the short term, you won’t be around for the long term. Bestselling business author Chuck Martin found that nothing consumes business managers more than how to manage a company in the weeks and months immediately ahead. As founder of NFI Research, an executive think tank made up of some 3,000 high-level executives at over 1,400 companies, Chuck Martin has interviewed and gathered the results of thousands of management specialists the world over to discover how companies are successfully zeroing in on improving short-term performance, while still balancing these efforts with long-term strategic goals. By looking to managers and executives at companies like IBM, SAP, Deloitte & Touche, Kraft, AT&T, Dow Chemical, and hundreds of others, Martin has uncovered the “best practices” that help propel short-term performance. Among them: •Bridging the enormous disconnect between management’s strategic goals and the ability of front-line managers and employees to implement these goals •Moving even the biggest projects forward incrementally, delivering tangible results at each step along the way •Putting together time-based and events-based teams that can focus specifically on essential short-term decisions and goals •Creating incentives to reward short-term results What Chuck Martin has found is that companies that adopt practices designed to achieve short-term results are usually better positioned to achieve their long-term strategies as well. A critically important management book that addresses one of the overriding concerns of businesses today,Managing for the Short Termis an essential addition to any manager’s toolkit. "Managing for the short term is not simply about moving faster. It is about moving smarter. It is about effective implementation and operation within the context of mission and vision. Strategy is implemented through a series of small steps and rapid, short-term decisions within that long-term view. It forces managers to become more effective at achieving the measurable results required by today's climate." FromManaging For the Short Term

Truly effective crisis management is--or should be--proactive. Burnett uses this guiding concept to offer managers in organizations of all types and sizes a system for handling crises more soundly, and with greater dexterity. He puts crises on a continuum, with minor events at one end and catastrophes at the other, creating a universal matrix that can be overlaid onto businesses of any kind. Burnett's methods of crisis management are already well recognized and are analogous to other types of management processes. This book focuses on managing crises proactively, but also includes the more common reactive strategies. Burnett begins by discussing the history and traditional concepts of crisis management, offering a rationale for adopting his own notions of proactive strategy. Chapters provide readers with a set of tools for classifying crises in any type of company. This book will add a new dimension to our understanding of what crises really are, how to evaluate them, and ultimately how to respond to and cope with them more successfully.