Managing Managers

Listen to hilarious stories with serious lessons that Michael Lopp extracts from his varied and sometimes bizarre experiences as a manager at Apple, Pinterest, Palantir, Netscape, Symantec, Slack, and Borland. Many of the stories first appeared in primitive form in Lopp’s perennially popular blog, Rands in Repose. The third edition of Managing Humans contains a whole new season of episodes from the ongoing saga of Lopp's adventures in Silicon Valley, together with classic episodes remastered for high fidelity and freshness. 

Your boss plays an important role in your career. So how do you navigate this delicate, significant professional relationship without playing political games or compromising your character? Managing Up offers concise, expert tips.

Discover how to improve your skills by learning how to motivate staff, improve performance and create positive relationships. Learn to build confidence, communicate clearly and establish trust for navigating situations such as giving feedback, settling conflicts and managing teams remotely.

Discover simple-to-use techniques to forge lasting and professional relationships in any corporate environment. Learn the art of Increasing Career Exposure and leveraging every interaction to propel your career forward. Whether you're struggling to communicate with your boss or looking to broaden your professional network, this book offers Effective Communication with Bosses and Building Professional Networks strategies that work.

Does it seem like you never have enough time to get everything done? Keeping on top of your tasks, deadlines, and work schedule can be daunting. Managing Time quickly walks you through the basics.

You've been asked to manage a key project—or perhaps you've volunteered for an assignment that could advance your career. So how do you make sure the project succeeds? Managing Projects walks you quickly through the basics.

We are terrible at managing creativity and innovation. But we're trying our best. Just beneath the ceiling of meeting rooms at night, everywhere around the world, from London to Lahore, Honolulu to Ho Chi Minh City, there is something sad happening. Above the long table and strewn chairs, amid the fluorescent light that has been left on despite the energy saving directive on the wall, there are a million little ideas just floating amongst the dust particles, drifting in the air. 

This is clearly abook every manager should listen to. One of the issues Mintzberg addresses is the frenetic pace and relentless pressures of the job - most managers hardly have time to think. So Mintzberg has done some revising and some updating and has distilled the essence of his original book into a lean, action-oriented shortened version. The core of the book remains the same: Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine different managers, from business, government, and nonprofits, working in diverse settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra.

Are you a good boss - or a great one? Get more of the management ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People (Vol. 2). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you master the innumerable challenges of being a manager.

Every manager makes tough calls - it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the "gray areas" - situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you've done the best analysis you can, and you still don't know what to do. But you have to make a decision. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems.

In today's modern global economy, companies and organizations in all sectors are embracing the game-changing benefits of the remote work­place. Managers benefit by saving money and resources and by having access to talent outside their zip codes, while employees enjoy greater job opportunities, productivity, independence, and work-life satisfaction. But in this new digital arena, companies need a plan for supporting efficiency and fostering streamlined, engaging teamwork.

This book spells out the qualities of a good project manager and takes you through the exact steps that you need to master to become competent as a project manager. Once you go through the tips provided in this book, you will not have to worry about the nature of the project at hand or its magnitude. You will have gained so much courage that no project will intimidate you. As you will realize after going through the book, it is not easy to forget the project management tips provided owing to their mode of delivery.

As a top-performing sales professional, you know how to own your calendar, focus your energy, create opportunities, navigate the sales process, negotiate, and close deals. Yet, if you are like most new sales managers, there is still so much you don’t know and that can trip you up if you aren’t careful. Luckily, Mike Weinberg knows the pitfalls to avoid and mindset changes needed to successfully make the leap. This powerful new resource contains candid guidance on how to master your expanded responsibilities like a pro.

A guide for new executives that explores how to create an overarching, enterprise-wide transformative program. The audiobook provides a best-practice checklist for eight core areas: strategy setting, technology alignment, business renovation, project management, communications renewal, employee engagement, staff transformation, and organizational design.

Music managers and artists will learn the secrets of successful management with scenarios from a manager’s work life, along with the legal and business skills to master them. The book teaches future music managers and artists how to acquire clients, negotiate contracts, develop image, administer taxes and finances, and deal with promoters, media, attorneys, and unions. Packed with industry guidelines and sure-fire career tips from industry icons, this book is a professional springboard for music managers, recording artists, singers, and rock bands alike.

Strategic initiatives are where the rubber meets the road when it comes to putting strategy into action, and leading a critical initiative may be the key to propelling your career forward. Yet managing a cross-functional team on a high-profile project can present a multitude of challenges and risks, causing even the most experienced manager to struggle.

Do you know that much of what you've learned about management and supervising is wrong? Are you aware that many of the business books you've read and classes you've attended have little or nothing to do with real life? Do you realize that much of the training you've taken about how to be an effective supervisor of a team of people actually serves to slow projects down, fails to inspire, and produces more work for everyone?

At a time when Warren Buffet has again emerged as the defining sage and darling of Wall Street, this fascinating book explodes the myths that surround the man from Omaha and brings new insights into his remarkable successes ¿ as a manager, an allocator of capital, and a role model for financial managers, investors, and business executives around the world. Many best-selling books have tried to unlock Buffett's secrets by analysing his genius as a stock picker. But they missed the point.

An IT manager's budget controls what he or she and his or her team are going to be able to accomplish this year. No, creating a budget may not be the most enjoyable thing that you'll be called on to do, but it just might be the most important. The challenge that a lot of IT managers have when it comes to creating a good budget is that it requires them to master a number of terms and concepts that they may have never encountered in school.

In a world where it becomes increasingly difficult to hire and manage employees, the contractor seems to be a happy alternative. What makes the contractor easier to manage? How do you find reliable contractors? If you are a contracter, how do you find customers and stability? In only 60 minutes of conversation and instruction learn the answer to this question from the author of The Entrepreneur's Guide and and co-founder of the Umbroller Stroller Company, the first folding baby stroller.