Best Management Books Online

How we rate the Best Management Books.

What puts a management book in the” best” list?

We’re often asked what makes a “best management book”.

Here’s what we think is important to deserve the rating of “best management book”:

• Practical advice – advice that’s presented in practical terms. Many management books are written as abstract views on management theory. Sometimes theory can be tortuous to get through and….even more time-consuming to work out how to apply it to a practical work situation.

• We think the information should be addressed to and appropriate for “Effective Executives” – not just “managers”. Often executives aren’t called managers but do manager work without all the manager responsibilities. At Team Effective we use the term “manager” as shorthand but we include “Effective Executives” in that term.

• Advice and suggestions should be real and practical. You can always tell when advice comes from a university academic who has never had to work with and be responsible for a team of people. Managers and executives sometimes need advice from someone who has clearly done the job themselves – you know – you can tell by how they write about a subject.

• Many management books concentrate on topics such as project management, setting goals and objectives, and fail to give enough time to the so called “soft skills”. That’s a very bad name we think for skills which are so vitally important. Soft skills are the skills of communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, active listening and showing consideration, empathy and care. Those skills are vitally important for all managers and particularly for people with a technical background. Often technical university courses and technical backgrounds don’t include these skills in the curriculum and so, when a technical expert becomes a people manager, there’s a gap in their necessary skills to do the job well.

• To be a “best management book”, a book should offer new ideas and ways to approach the challenges a manager faces every day. Most days your normal range of ideas work fine but sometimes you need something else – something extra – but it has to be something directly relevant to your situation.

• Managers hit low points or even just “stale times” and they need inspiring and motivating themselves. They spend all their energies motivating and inspiring their teams with little left over for themselves. A “best management book” will also inspire and motivate a manager to take action on the content they’ve just read. That could be just the idea they need to lift their game to another level.

• Managers explain that they want focused advice and information – set out in a “how to” style which they can use directly and immediately without interpreting and applying woolly non-specific “talking around an issue”.

• Information and advice needs to be relevant to the modern work environment. So many management books were written decades ago. The essentials are still sound but need to be updated and applied to the present day. workplace and work ethic. There have been huge changes in culture in the last 5 years.

• Managers need to feel that a “best management book” reflects true, real-life management as it is on the action floors of organizations  – situations that managers will recognize.

• We’re told that management books which are the best for managers should be concise. Quality is far more important that quantity. 50 great pages are better than 437 mediocre ones. Managers haven’t got spare time to read, let alone plough through 437 pages of which only 50 “do the job” and are “on the button”.

• Another huge problem can be that the best management book isn’t available for sale in every country – it may be the best but it’s no good if you can’t get it.

• It has to be immediately accessible to be the best – managers can’t wait a week or more for a book to be delivered – problems are NOW. Therefore books which can be downloaded immediately are the best.

• Even the best management book may not go far enough or go deeply enough into a topic. Often managers need additional support from extra materials which they can use with the book and as supplements to the book

Here are just 4 of the best management books online that we’d recommend.

 

• The Executive in Action: Managing for Results, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker.
  This book contains three of the “best management books” in one.

• Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices by Peter Drucker  
  is a true-to-life account of management and we think it should be required reading for all managers.

• Listening: The Forgotten Skill: A Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self-Teaching Guides) by Madelyn Burley-Allen. 
  Listening is an essential manager skill and knowing exactly when to stop talking and listen to  people is an extension of that skill.

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – by Stephen R Covey
  is an integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems

Please also look at my own Best Management Books Online  – eBooks that you can download today.