Saturday, July 3, 2010

Manager definition

Definition:
A Manager is the person responsible for planning and directing the work of a group of individuals, monitoring their work, and taking corrective action when necessary. For many people, this is their first step into a management career.

Managers may direct workers directly or they may direct several supervisors who direct the workers. The manager must be familiar with the work of all the groups he/she supervises, but does not need to be the best in any or all of the areas. It is more important for the manager to know how to manage the workers than to know how to do their work well.

A manager may have the power to hire or fire employees or to promote them. In larger companies, a manager may only recommends such action to the next level of management. The manager has the authority to change the work assignments of team members.

A manager's title reflects what he/she is responsible for. An Accounting Manager supervises the Accounting function. An Operations Manager is responsible for the operations of the company. The Manager of Design Engineering supervises engineers and support staff engaged in design of a product or service. A Night Manager is responsible for the activities that take place at night. There are many management functions in business and, therefore, many manager titles. Regardless of title, the manager is responsible for planning, directing, monitoring and controlling the people and their work.
Examples:
The Production Manager developed a staffing plan for the factory.

Definition International Management

Definition International Management

International Management deals with the maintenance and development of a multinational operation across national borders, whose manager has the knowledge and the skills to manage and handle cross-cultural processes, stakeholders and environments in a right way.

Business Definition for: International Management

* the maintenance and development of an organization's production or market interests across national borders with either local or expatriate staff
* the process of running a multinational business made up of formerly independent organizations
* the body of skills, knowledge, and understanding required to manage cross-cultural operations



If you look up the dictionary definition of management, among many examples you will find clues as to the real definition of management. This article simply takes an assortment of definitions and looks at what they say and what they imply about management.

“Management” (from Old French ménagement “the art of conducting, directing”, from Latin manu agere “to lead by the hand”) characterises the process of leading and directing all or part of an organization, often a business, through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, financial, material, intellectual or intangible). …


This management definition is interesting because it traces the root meaning back to the Latin phrase meaning “to lead by the hand”. Leading by the hand implies giving direction that is stronger than just a passing suggestion yet still fairly gentle in approach. Leading by the hand also implies that the person doing the leading is first going where the follower is being lead. The leader is not asking the follower to do something he is not willing to do himself.

The guidance and control of action required to execute a program. Also, the individuals charged with the responsibility of conducting a program.
ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA/evaluation/glossary/glossary_m.htm

This definition of management refers to a “program”. This implies that, for management to be effective, there needs to be some type of defined approach or system in place. This system becomes the plan and management is guiding others in following that plan. This is often the downfall of managers. They have no plan or system. As a result their actions seem random to the people they are managing and this leads to confusion and disappointment. This is why it is so important for business managers to have an employee manual. Without the employee manual providing direction, managers will struggle to be fair and balanced in their dealings with employees.

is the organizational process that includes strategic planning, setting; objectives, managing resources, deploying the human and financial assets needed to achieve objectives, and measuring results. Management also includes recording and storing facts and information for later use or for others within the organization. Management functions are not limited to managers and supervisors. Every member of the organization has some management and reporting functions as part of their job.


This management definition is more in depth and tailored toward business management. Notice that it consists of three primary activities. First, management establishes a plan. This plan becomes the road map for what work is going to be done. Second, management allocates resources to implement the plan. Third, management measures the results to see how the end product compares with what was originally envisioned. Most management failings can be attributed to insufficient effort occurring in one of these three areas.

The definition goes on to talk about how management is responsible for measuring details that may not be required presently, but may be useful later on. These measurements often help determine the objectives in the planning stage.

When management is following this type of sequence, it becomes a continuing cycle. Plan, execute, and measure. The measurements become the basis for the next planning stage and so on.

is the activity of getting things done with the aid of people and other resources.
wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/213/218150/glossary.html

This definition of management focus on management as the process of accomplishing work through the efforts of others. Skilled managers can accomplish much more through others than they can through their own single efforts.

Effective utilization and coordination of resources such as capital, plant, materials, and labour to achieve defined objectives with maximum efficiency.
.ecbp.org/glossary.htm

This definition of management looks at not only the people but the entire range of resources necessary to follow a plan. Notice how it focuses on efficiency. Management isn’t just getting from point A to point B. It is getting there by choosing the best possible path.

1. The process of getting activities completed efficiently with and through other people; 2. The process of setting and achieving goals through the execution of five basic management functions: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling; that utilize human, financial, and material resources.
crfonline.org/orc/glossary/m.html

The first definition looks at the fact that management is getting work done through other people. The second definition divides management up into five components. These components are all parts of the three components (plan, execute, measure) that we looked at above. However the more detailed definition helps show the activities that occur in each of the three phase definition.

The process of planning, leading, organizing and controlling people within a group in order to achieve goals; also used to mean the group of people who do this.
booksites.net/download/chadwickbeech/Glossary.htm

Once again, this definition of management addresses accomplishing work through other people. This definition stresses the activities that are necessary for reaching particular goals.

the process of achieving the objectives of the business organization by bringing together human, physical, and financial resources in an optimum combination and making the best decision for the organization while taking into consideration its operating environment.
ucs.mun.ca/~rsexty/business1000/glossary/M.htm

This management definition talks about the different components that managers need to control in order to achieve objectives. One differentiator of this definition is the way it considers the operating environment as part of what a manager must understand.

the role of conducting and supervising a business.
becbiz.com.au/glossary.htm

This is a broad definition of management that doesn’t consider management as something that can take place outside of a business.

International Tourism Management

International Tourism Management is a degree course, whose main focuses with regard to contents consist of business basics with a tourism covering, cross cultural and social competence as well as leadership- and professional competence.

Hospitality management is the academic study of the hospitality industry. A degree in Hospitality management is often conferred from either a university college dedicated to the studies of hospitality management or a business school with a department in hospitality management studies. Degrees in hospitality management may also be referred to as hotel management, hotel and tourism management, or hotel administration. Degrees conferred in this academic field include Bachelors of Arts, Bachelors of Science, Masters of Science, MBA, and Doctorate of Philosophy.

Hospitality management studies provides a focus on management of hospitality operations including hotels, restaurants, amusement parks, destination marketing organizations, convention centers, country clubs, and related industries.

Management topics and functions

Basic functions of management

Management operates through various functions, often classified as planning, organizing, leading/directing, and controlling/monitoring.

* Planning: Deciding what needs to happen in the future (today, next week, next month, next year, over the next 5 years, etc.) and generating plans for action.
* Organizing: (Implementation) making optimum use of the resources required to enable the successful carrying out of plans.
* Staffing: Job Analyzing, recruitment, and hiring individuals for appropriate jobs.
* Leading/Directing: Determining what needs to be done in a situation and getting people to do it.
* Controlling/Monitoring: Checking progress against plans.
* Motivation : Motivation is also a kind of basic function of management, because without motivation employee cannot work effectively. If motivation doesn't takes place in an organization then employees may not contribute to the other functions (which are usually set by top level management).

Formation of the business policy

* The mission of the business is its most obvious purpose -- which may be, for example, to make soap.
* The vision of the business reflects its aspirations and specifies its intended direction or future destination.
* The objectives of the business refers to the ends or activity at which a certain task is aimed.
* The business's policy is a guide that stipulates rules, regulations and objectives, and may be used in the managers' decision-making. It must be flexible and easily interpreted and understood by all employees.
* The business's strategy refers to the coordinated plan of action that it is going to take, as well as the resources that it will use, to realize its vision and long-term objectives. It is a guideline to managers, stipulating how they ought to allocate and utilize the factors of production to the business's advantage. Initially, it could help the managers decide on what type of business they want to form.

How to implement policies and strategies

* All policies and strategies must be discussed with all managerial personnel and staff.
* Managers must understand where and how they can implement their policies and strategies.
* A plan of action must be devised for each department.
* Policies and strategies must be reviewed regularly.
* Contingency plans must be devised in case the environment changes.
* Assessments of progress ought to be carried out regularly by top-level managers.
* A good environment and team spirit is required within the business.
* The missions, objectives, strengths and weaknesses of each department must be analysed to determine their roles in achieving the business's mission.
* The forecasting method develops a reliable picture of the business's future environment.
* A planning unit must be created to ensure that all plans are consistent and that policies and strategies are aimed at achieving the same mission and objectives.

All policies must be discussed with all managerial personnel and staff that is required in the execution of any departmental policy.

* Organizational change is strategically achieved through the implementation of the eight-step plan of action established by John P. Kotter: Increase urgency, get the vision right, communicate the buy-in, empower action, create short-term wins, don't let up, and make change stick.


Where policies and strategies fit into the planning process

* They give mid- and lower-level managers a good idea of the future plans for each department in an organization.
* A framework is created whereby plans and decisions are made.
* Mid- and lower-level management may add their own plans to the business's strategic ones.

multi-divisional management hierarchy

The management of a large organization may have about five levels:

1. Senior management (or "top management" or "upper management")
2. Middle management
3. Low-level management, such as supervisors or team-leaders
4. Foreman
5. Rank and File

Top-level management

* Require an extensive knowledge of management roles and skills.
* They have to be very aware of external factors such as markets.
* Their decisions are generally of a long-term nature
* Their decisions are made using analytic, directive, conceptual and/or behavioral/participative processes
* They are responsible for strategic decisions.
* They have to chalk out the plan and see that plan may be effective in the future.
* They are executive in nature.

Middle management

* Mid-level managers have a specialized understanding of certain managerial tasks.
* They are responsible for carrying out the decisions made by top-level management.
* finance,marketing etc are comes under middle level management

Lower management

* This level of management ensures that the decisions and plans taken by the other two are carried out.
* Lower-level managers' decisions are generally short-term ones.

Foreman / lead hand

* They are people who have direct supervision over the working force in office factory, sales field or other workgroup or areas of activity.

Rank and File

* The responsibilities of the persons belonging to this group are even more restricted and more specific than those of the foreman

Friday, July 2, 2010

Masterclasses managemant

Learn business management from the masters: Andrew Grove, Bill Gates, Charles Handy, Jack Welch, Peter Drucker, Stephen Covey, Tom Peters and Warren Buffett.

As the world's leading business and management gurus, they have formulated strategies and theories that have a proven record of success. The Masterclasses below offer step-by-step instruction on the business processes and management practices that have guided the eight Masters to the forefront of business management. By following the Masterclasses and putting the business ideas into practice, the knowledge and experience of the Masters can work for you

The Thinking CEO
The Thinking CEO is a new and powerful resource for anybody who wants to be or work for a better informed, better equipped and more effective Chief Executive. Learn...

The Thinking CEO contains articles, written by leading experts in their fields, that will be included in CEO Today, the twice-yearly glossy magazine published by Sovereign Publications. To find out more about Sovereign and CEO Today, use the following link...

... or start reading now. You will learn:

• How to drive for innovation with Peter Fanning transforming Government procurement, Eddie Obeng (Pentacle the Virtual Business School) surviving to evolve, Simon Jones (Inctinos Innovation) turning innovation into profit, Alistair Schofield (Extensor) using brains to improve leadership and management and Derek Medhurst (D&D Excellence) following the principles of managerial excellence to achieve excellent performance.

• Fix the finances with Joanne Segars (NAPF) on the long-term future of pensions, Eric Simonsen (Alix Partners) restructuring for turnaround, Terry Carroll (Eatonfield Group) recruiting the best employees and Tim Keogh (Mercer Human Resource Consulting) dealing with the pensions deficit.

• Create profits with John Forbat's guide to entrpreneurial management, Keith Williamson (Alix Partners) guarding against overseas corruption, Professor Dan Jones (Lean Enterprise Academy) fixing broken business models with lean solutions, Professor Merlin Stone (WCL) and Dak Liyanearach's (LBM) ways to retain customers.

• Achieve productivity through people with Deirdre Kenny (CTPartners) on the new CEO's first 100 days, Mick Marchington (Manchester Business School) going back to basics with HRM, Alistair Schofield (Extensor) making leadership training effective, John Fisher (Oxford Motivation) using incentive schemes to increase perfomance and profit and Cora Lynn Heimer Rathbone on the importance of formally developing even the most talented people when major change is afoot.

• Win overseas with Marios Gregori (PKF) on how and why sales and leasebacks are back, John Sebastian making the case for Finnish FDI, Tobias Just (Deutsche Bank Research) analysing the attraction of German real estate, Nigel Wilcock's (Ernst & Young) winners and losers in Foreign Direct Investment and Dougals Beal and Tjun Tang's (The Boston Consulting Group) lessons for success from the Chinese banking market.

• Successfully structure the business with Michael Izza accounting for corporate responsibility, Nick Dennis on the Inside Story of BS 25999, Lyndon Bird taking the lead with continuity standards, Gillian Lees (CIMA) on the strategic power of corporate finance, Lyndon Bird (Business Continuity Institute) continuing with the business, Fiona Czerniawska (Management Consultancies Association) and the reinvention of management consulting, Lynda Purser (IMC) and Dominic Moorhouse (Moorhouse Consulting) adapting to the changing role of consultants, Albert Humphrey (Business Planning & Development Corp) using teams to make strategic planning work and Bill Tate (Prometheus Consulting) placing leadership development within the context of organisation development.

• Win with technology with Jonathan P. Bowen finding the abstract route to better software, Dennis Keeling on software and coping with the business burden, Jonathan Kinsella (HM Revenue & Customs) on podcast campaigns, Jim Greenfield (PKF) on fit, lean and thin communications, Sue Black (BCSWomen) stopping the IT brain drain, and Laurie Orlov closing the CIO-CEO gap.

Leadership & Management Review

Thinking Managers is about to launch Leadership & Management Review - a monthly newsletter offering you easy access to the very best business writing.

Drawing from highly rated sources such as Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Business Week, Management Today, Fortune, The Economist, and Forbes, Leadership & Management Review is the easiest way to keep up to date with the latest thoughts, opinions, ideas and advice from the most influential people in fields such as strategy, innovation, business development and management theory.

Designed for busy people like you, each issue of Leadership & Management Review contains summaries of the most informative and thought-provoking articles from the world's online business media - and if you want to read even more, you can simply click through to the original features at source via the links provided.

Covering a whole range of sources and subjects, Leadership & Management Review is your 'one stop shop' for business intelligence.

Leadership & Management Review brings you…

• A concise overview of key articles from the online business media

• Opinions and advice of from top management thinkers and CEOs

• A digest of the latest management theories and research

…all in one easy-to-read monthly package.
Thinking Managers

You can make a good case for using business management consultants. They are not committed either emotionally or intellectually to the status quo.

Not only can they see what changes are needed for business development, but have acquired expertise - which their hosts have not - in structuring a change programme, selling it to the participants (willing and unwilling), and easing the strains and pains the change is bound to bring.

But the consultant is, of course, tied to the people who pay the fees. If the executive managers can't make a clean break from the past, all the management consultants in the world can't help to achieve radical change in business strategy.

But supposing we give you the ammunition, the logic and procedures to introduce 'best practice' techniques into your work practices? As an insider, could you make change happen?

Thinking Managers provides solutions to hundreds of common management problems. I'd like you to try it, at no risk, over the next two months.

Most managers are far too busy to do our kind of investigative business management analysis. And we are the best, by far, at doing it.

DotComGiftShop, an online gifts shop, recently used one Thinking Managers article to double their online birthday gifts sales. That story is similar to one we heard from a garden furniture site.

Led by Robert Heller, our editors are among the leading creative thinkers in management today. They are highly critical of many business management practices.

They give examples of bad practice so you'll avoid making the same mistakes as others. Then they offer guidelines for a way forward to help you achieve quality management. We are currently offering a two-month free trial. If you decide to subscribe, you'll build a substantial workbook of best practice procedures for every important aspect regarding the management and development of a successful business, including:
Creativity • Decision Making • Lateral Thinking • Priorities • Problem Solving • Risk Strategy • Change Management • Crisis Management • Human Resource Management • Management Consulting • Management Styles • Management Theories • Management Training • Performance Management • Quality Management • Risk Management • Strategic Management • Total Quality Management • Business Analysis • Business Consulting • Business Development • Business Ethics • Business Intelligence • Business Law • Business Magazines • Business Management Skills • Business Strategy • International Business • Internet Business • Online Business • Small Business • Corporate Acquisitions • Corporate Communication • Corporate Culture • Corporate Restructuring • Corporate Responsibility • Corporate Turnaround • Entrepreneurship • LeadershipThinking Managers is about to launch Leadership & Management Review - a monthly newsletter offering you easy access to the very best business writing.

Drawing from highly rated sources such as Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Business Week, Management Today, Fortune, The Economist, and Forbes, Leadership & Management Review is the easiest way to keep up to date with the latest thoughts, opinions, ideas and advice from the most influential people in fields such as strategy, innovation, business development and management theory.

Designed for busy people like you, each issue of Leadership & Management Review contains summaries of the most informative and thought-provoking articles from the world's online business media - and if you want to read even more, you can simply click through to the original features at source via the links provided.

Covering a whole range of sources and subjects, Leadership & Management Review is your 'one stop shop' for business intelligence.

Leadership & Management Review brings you…

• A concise overview of key articles from the online business media

• Opinions and advice of from top management thinkers and CEOs

• A digest of the latest management theories and research

…all in one easy-to-read monthly package.
Thinking Managers

You can make a good case for using business management consultants. They are not committed either emotionally or intellectually to the status quo.

Not only can they see what changes are needed for business development, but have acquired expertise - which their hosts have not - in structuring a change programme, selling it to the participants (willing and unwilling), and easing the strains and pains the change is bound to bring.

But the consultant is, of course, tied to the people who pay the fees. If the executive managers can't make a clean break from the past, all the management consultants in the world can't help to achieve radical change in business strategy.

But supposing we give you the ammunition, the logic and procedures to introduce 'best practice' techniques into your work practices? As an insider, could you make change happen?

Thinking Managers provides solutions to hundreds of common management problems. I'd like you to try it, at no risk, over the next two months.

Most managers are far too busy to do our kind of investigative business management analysis. And we are the best, by far, at doing it.

DotComGiftShop, an online gifts shop, recently used one Thinking Managers article to double their online birthday gifts sales. That story is similar to one we heard from a garden furniture site.

Led by Robert Heller, our editors are among the leading creative thinkers in management today. They are highly critical of many business management practices.

They give examples of bad practice so you'll avoid making the same mistakes as others. Then they offer guidelines for a way forward to help you achieve quality management. We are currently offering a two-month free trial. If you decide to subscribe, you'll build a substantial workbook of best practice procedures for every important aspect regarding the management and development of a successful business, including:
Creativity • Decision Making • Lateral Thinking • Priorities • Problem Solving • Risk Strategy • Change Management • Crisis Management • Human Resource Management • Management Consulting • Management Styles • Management Theories • Management Training • Performance Management • Quality Management • Risk Management • Strategic Management • Total Quality Management • Business Analysis • Business Consulting • Business Development • Business Ethics • Business Intelligence • Business Law • Business Magazines • Business Management Skills • Business Strategy • International Business • Internet Business • Online Business • Small Business • Corporate Acquisitions • Corporate Communication • Corporate Culture • Corporate Restructuring • Corporate Responsibility • Corporate Turnaround • Entrepreneurship • Leadership

Team Management

True leadership and teamwork

Artifical barriers between leaders and led are only one obstacle to true teamwork. Interdepartmental and cross-functional rivalries - what Americans call 'turf wars' - are other serious hurdles, made worse by the fact that they are seldom overcome. They're known in sport, too. Try to persuade rugby forwards that they can learn from backs, or vice versa, and you'll usually get no more change than when persuading marketing to work (as it should) hand-in-glove with production, or either to cooperate willingly with finance.

The skills essential to the modern manager thus include the ability to work with other functional talents in teams - and to lead, not by the authority of command, but that of expertise. Team leadership, paradoxically, includes knowing when to hand over the lead to others, as their expertise moves to the fore. In games, this stems naturally from the functional demands. Only the quarterback can call the plays in American football: in rugby, lineout tactics are equally an expert function.

In the Pearl Harbour movie, Tora! Tora! Tora!, the decision to attack is discussed, in parallel thinking style, by officers giving their opinions one by one, without the to-and-fro of Western debate. Then Admiral Yamamoto sums up the meeting and gives the go-ahead. The task of planning the onslaught, though, is entrusted to the fleet's best strategist, who happens to be a young lieutenant. And his plan then gets a going-over from the best critic, a captain (he finds it perfect).

That's true teamwork in action. We previously mentioned that, when GM Europe was developing its Omega executive car, thirteen teams worked together, each containing all ten functions. A further crucial point is that project leadership changed hands as different stages stressed different needs. Some managers now spend half their time in ad hoc task forces, tackling specific problems or projects, whose success depends on deferring to the right expert at the right moment. Some experts play no greater part than the player who enters the Super Bowl only to kick at goal: but like his, the limited role may be vital.

All managers recognise the need to form small, self-managed, focused teams when a specific task must be completed. To take just one of countless examples, at Ciba, the Swiss chemical giant, a project designed to save millions on purchasing and warehousing costs demanded a core of a dozen full-time executives, taken away from their former jobs for four years, and helped by many part-timers. But why should the principle of horizontal, multi-disciplinary, cross-functional teams apply only to one-off projects? What about the continuing work of the business?

The guru-blessed tendency favours reorganising businesses into smaller sub-units, each given the fullest possible decentralised authority by a small, strategic headquarters. This goes hand-in-hand with removal of unnecessary layers of management; that 'de-layering' is the main cause of the new curse of executive unemployment. De-layering sounds an excellent idea; so it is, provided that management processes (as opposed to the structure) are reorganised round the fewer layers. If processes stay unchanged, the layers may vanish, but the duties don't. As a report from Exeter University's Centre for Management Studies says:

'...the removal of a layer of management which many companies have undertaken has meant that responsibilities from the moved tier have been reallocated to the levels above and below...the staff remaining have more responsibility, in some cases too much, which can lead to stress and inefficiency'.

Nearly one in three of the companies subjected to Exeter's research had 'been involved in organisational changes' in the past three years. Many firms had indeed decentralised. But an equal number had moved in the opposite direction.

Whatever the gurus propose, those who dispose have simpler thoughts. The decentralised business, eager for change, or forced into changing, centralises: the centralised outfit does the opposite. Top management has no trouble in making persuasive cases for either of the contrary changes.

Much of this 'restructuring' has been done in haste to cut costs, and with no thought either for team-building or the long-term future of the business. Top managements react much like unthinking sports selectors (of which England's rugby choosers, in the pre-Cooke era, and Test cricket selectors, more often than not, are notoriously bad examples). The team loses, so heads roll (but not, of course, those of the selectors).

In the days before Douglas McGregor's Theory Y became the norm, the Theory X hire-and-fire method of obtaining improved performance was thought to be effective. But nothing demoralises teams more, in business or sport, than arbitrary execution. Changes are essential from time to time, of course. But unless they are understood and endorsed by those who remain on the team, the results may be counter-productive. Arbitarily 'down-sized' or 'right-sized' companies may be leaner and fitter, but they won't have higher morale.

Nor will their leanness and fitness count for much unless they are part and parcel of a strong future strategy. The Exeter study's anxieties on this crucial point are supported by GMS Executive Leasing, whose Michael Dobson notes the 'insufficient attention...given to what the company's shape will be in two, five or ten years time'. Will the traditional layered hierarchy, for instance, continue to make sense - even with fewer layers?

Managers agree on the need to break down barriers between departments by forming horizontal teams. They are less eager to contemplate the radical solution of breaking down the departments themselves. The concept of the 'strategic business unit' - the decentralised sub-unit mentioned above - is the antithesis of departmental management. What justifies the latter's continued strength? Why retain large central functions, from marketing and sales to finance, if the organisation is subdivided into discrete businesses?

Some sub-units, of course, are so large that they can readily breed bureaucracies of their own. The centralising tendencies are always at work, because top management likes to manage - and requires human machinery to help. But there's an extreme alternative. A few companies, like Sherwood Computer Services, have developed the task force idea into an organising principle. The business teams organise themselves - and substantially take charge of their own destinies.

At one investment bank, the IT department (normally one of the most powerful and self-contained functions) has thus been broken up. Its members were dispersed to the different businesses, each of which is now armed with its own IT expertise. There's no reason why self-managed groups, each with full functional services, shouldn't be the building blocks of the organisation: and every reason why (to take a bad example) separate sales and customer service operations should cease to be separate.

The company gains in flexible speed and shared experience what is lost in tidiness. Anyway, the tidiness can be illusory. In 1993 Volkswagen, under extreme economic pressure, was making rapid (though belated) progress on raising productivity and quality by better teamwork in manufacturing: but all its other functions remained resolutely immobile. They simply weren't playing on the same team - or even, sometimes, playing the same game.

That is a gross failure of leadership, which raises a conundrum. The old principle had the virtue of clarity. As the sign said on Harry Truman's desk, 'the buck stops here.' There's something inherently unattractive about the idea that you can keep your head, and stay head, even after crass mismanagement. Justice seems to require that the team leader should pay the price of failure, even when it's not necessarily his own. But if the team is a genuine interacting group of equals, and any change should be handled with the consensual tact recommended above, shouldn't the leader be treated with equal respect?

Yet it's awfully hard to accept the protracted delays before self-evidently failed chieftains - at IBM, General Motors and Kodak, for instance - were removed. In these cases, like those where founding fathers of fallen British stars have vacated the premises, board pressure helped force the departures. But what had the same directors had been doing and saying while decline was gathering momentum? They could argue - as British political apologists have done - that where cock-ups are collective, rather than individual responsibilities, the individual shouldn't carry the can.

In other words, if the Cabinet acts as a team, it's unfair to single out one member of that team, even the leader of the failed department, for the blame. In theory, that poor excuse applies equally in business - for the board, or management committee, is just as much (or little) of a team as the Cabinet. In practice, however, this is mythical. Many such teams don't function as teams: they are dominated by one or two figures, and the rest go along for the ride. In those circumstances, it's only right that, when the vehicle leaves the road, so should the driver.

But the object of managing, of course, is to win: not only to stay on the road, but to drive powerfully ahead. If the teams had truly functioned as effective working groups, far better results would have flowed: and the executions would thus have been unnecessary. It follows that the prime task of true leadership is to create teams which, in the final analysis, lead themselves to success.

People Managing

Human Resource Management

No management cliché is pronounced with more fervour but less sincerity than 'People are our most important asset.' That old chestnut happens to pay off, though - if you treat human assets with the same care and attention that are brought (or should be) to plant, equipment and premises.

Several companies featured in this column have rightly laid great stress on their people policies. Edward Smith of John McGavigan Automotive Products called his employees 'the experts'. To 'exploit the potential' of these people, McGavigan invested heavily in 'training, teams and communication.'

McGavigan's a manufacturer. But David Craven of NST, selling educational tours, is just as emphatic on the need to find and develop 'very highly motivated, skilled staff.' Two advertising men, Richard Hall and Richard French of FWWH, chime in: 'only work with people you like, know and trust - and never underestimate their abilities.'

People also provide a dominant theme for the Department of Trade and Industry's drive to improve national competitiveness. Winning sums up a study, carried out with the CBI, of 121 best-practice businesses, which 'unlock the potential of their people' by....

1. Creating a culture in which employees are genuinely empowered and focused on the customer.
2. Investing in people through good communications, learning and training.
3. Flattening and inverting the organisational pyramid.

What those fine words mean in real life - and smaller companies - is shown by three case histories. The first, Navico, makes navigational equipment and waterproof radios for the recreational market. Freeing its 90 employees, who were stuck in an old-fashioned, highly supervised, multi-layered hierarchy, required drastic action.

The boss, Mike Bowerman, closed the factory for two days, took everybody to a hotel and explained why everybody had to change. He 'advertised' for 'team leaders': three out of four came from the shop floor, not from the supervisors. He also nominated 'product champions', people 'who have a desire to drive and get things done.'

Leaders and champions alike went on a training course in the modern technique of cellular manufacturing - and every employee in the factory was retrained: all are now multiskilled. In two years, Navico's turnover rose by 70% to £5.1 million - and profits did even better, advancing over eightfold to half-a-million.

At Dutton Engineering (Woodside), 25 people make precision stainless steel enclosures for the electronics industry. Turnover per direct employee has risen by half since 1991, following the introduction of team working - and trust: 'The men and women on the shop floor', says Ken Lewis, 'are skilled enough and professional enough to make it right in the first place.'

That wasn't an easy idea for Lewis's managers to accept. Instead of giving orders, they had to learn to 'coach, facilitate, lead.' The teams themselves had inhibitions to overcome, too. Introducing a system of annual hours changed their thinking: 'Once the tasks for that week were finished, the team could go home. They worked a lot more effectively once they realised that.'

At Sunrise Medical, managing director Barrie Payne also used focused teams in his winning people formula. The 370 employees, making custom mobility products for the disabled, are encouraged to find their own ways to do things better - and once a month the factory closes for half-an-hour to praise their achievements.

That means 'anything an individual has done, however small, over and above what they might be expected to do.' The achievers get entered in a prize draw. That doesn't sound like a big deal. But small, low-cost, original ideas can produce big incentives and large results - like Sunrise's eleven years of 20% compound growth.

Managing people imaginatively isn't the only winning way you need, of course. The DTI-CBI studies also drum home the importance of constantly innovating in products and services - and of really knowing your customers. But people are also the keys to innovation and customer service.

At Navico, everybody went sailing to get in the same boat (so to speak) as the customers. Dutton's manufacturing cells have direct customer contact; so does every Sunrise manager. As Winning says, 'Winning companies know people make the difference

Business Markets

Every business is sitting on a goldmine. Some marvellous opportunity always exists, either within the market already being served, or in another. But most firms never find the gold: or having done so, fail to mine the rich seam.

The idea can be brilliantly new, like the high-tech creations of the computer nerds. Or the inspiration may be as old as the hills - or the floors. There's a US chain of carpet franchises, Maxim, that makes Sir Phil Harris's past sprints look like a crawl. It's annual growth rate is 297%.

That pace of sales expansion, by both nature and the laws of mathematics, must eventually slow. Even new businesses that have never experienced such headiness suffer from the same phenomenon. The chance is spotted and seized. But the entrepreneur runs out of steam - probably before the market does.

Markets can be inexhaustible, as the Griggs family of Wollaston has demonstrated in footwear, another ancient trade. The first Griggs, Benjamin, started making boots in 1901. His heirs didn't produce their first boot to a revolutionary German design until April Fool's Day, 1960. The name was Dr.Martens, and the rest is history.

The secrets of success for the Griggs Group included a goodly supply of family sprigs: the ability to take over other local shoemakers on a friendly basis to sustain expansion ('We've simply talked to families in the next street'): and the special comfort and youth appeal of the air-cushioned Doc Martens boots themselves.

That last paragraph combines two of some valuable pointers to small company goldmines listed by Fortune magazine. First, as noted, you don't need a Microsoft-style new business: mature, even over-ripe industries contain great openings. Second, you must have a winning edge, hard to imitate and quick to appeal.

An example of maturity, though it may look novel at first sight, is healthcare, now rivalling computery as a source of super-growth. In Britain as in the US, providing medical needs - from hospital beds and clinics, via the doctors and nurses who serve them, to the drugs and dressings they administer - is big, fragmented, growing business.

Healthcare is so big that even a fragment can yield a fortune. Supplying drugs to 90,000 patients and finding nurses, etc. for 10,000 more has given one US company $549 million in sales and growth of 110% annually. The clientele is implied by the title: Grancare, Inc.

Whether the customers are grans or punks, the same financial rules apply. Profitable growth, not expansion for its own sake, is what unlocks the future. If the high sales growth continues, but the high margins typical of early success start to dwindle, trouble lies ahead.

A drooping return on capital is also ominous. Unless the business is averaging at least a 15% yield on the equity, without much fluctuation, the growth isn't soundly based financially. The pressure to borrow will mount - and debt should be sparingly used.

Following such sage advice may well limit the pace of expansion. Accepting that there are limits to growth doesn't come easily to the gung-ho entrepreneurial mentality. A 25% annual expansion in sales, though, doubles the business in under three years, which may be steady, but certainly isn't slow.

An American survey of high and low-growth companies showed that, over 21 years, the sluggards actually outperformed the speedsters in the stock market, with returns half again as high. British investors who stuck with the USM shooting stars will know the feeling. In case after case, soaring was followed by slump.

That, however, raises the question of time horizons. Two decades may seem like a century to a management whose activity is expanding by 414% annually, like the gambling business of Grand Casinos: or 386%, like Employee Solutions, which looks after all the staff administration needs for small employers.

But any really good idea - and that one's splendid - will have staying power. Moreover, big company experiences have stressed the paradox that, if management raises its eyes from the short term to well-planned, ambitious long-term objectives, short-term performance improves. That's no magic. Building a golden future forces you to construct a golden base.

Business Enterprise: Entrepreneurship and spotting business opportunitiesBusiness Enterprise: Entrepreneurship and spotting business opportunities

These columns provide an enlightening perspective on the business of being an entrepreneur. For a start, that's the real business of the businessman and woman - being enterprising, spotting and seizing opportunities.

Opportunity abounds. There's nothing else in common between running conference centres for other businesses, making fabrics for office furniture, providing stock-taking services, forecasting the business future, etc, etc. Each provided an opening that non-entrepreneurs would have ignored or rejected.

Everybody has probably had one or several business ideas of a similar nature: a product or service which (like puncture-proof, environmentally friendly bicycle tyres) is either not being provided, or not being provided well. But there's a huge jump between seeing the possibility of a unique business and creating it.

For virtually all the entrepreneurs featured, that giant leap was hazardous, with a grave threat of falling short. The despair felt by the founders of the Harrogate Management Centre in their first, money-losing months has been experienced by many others. Persistence in the face of adversity is indispensable.

Persistence beyond adversity is equally vital. These entrepreneurs are perfectionists. Good is never good enough. Camborne Fabrics, with its costly efforts to improve on a 97% next-day delivery record, is only one example of the continuous entrepreneurial drive to create a better business with even more satisfied customers.

That emphasis on customers wouldn't have figured anything like so prominently a decade ago. Customer-first policies have been preached to big companies by management gurus, but small entrepreneurs reached the same conclusion through practical necessity. Like being good, just having customers isn't enough today.

The only sure defence against the competition, to which the dissatisfied modern buyer will turn in a flash, is to make good customer service into excellent. It's the toughest task in business, because no two customers are the same, and because no system will ever generate perfect service. Only people can - and they often fail.

That's why people have moved into the forefront of business thinking, along with the customer. If you don't satisfy and train the men and women who work with and for you, they're most unlikely to satisfy the customer, still less to produce excellence. Big companies agonise over this fact - but here smaller firms have the edge.

The proprietor can get to know everybody, not just by name, but as real people with a real contribution to make. Talk to employees in any large company, and you'll be struck by two things: the depth of their knowledge of the business and how it can be improved: and management's lack of interest in that profitable know-how.

The large company concentrates too much on profit, too little on the non-financial elements that create that bottom line. In contrast, the entrepreneur, however good at the basic business, often lacks a sound grip on the business basics - among them, stringent cash control, earning a goodly return on capital and minimising debt.

Return on capital is an equation. Earning a decent profit is only half the battle. Keeping the capital employed as low as possible is the other half. Achieving rapid growth carries risks: growing revenues fast while restraining overheads and maintaining effective controls is the demanding, but perfectly feasible task.

It's become much more feasible because of developments like the personal computer, business information services of all kinds, advanced telecommunications, and fragmenting markets - all of which mean that the smaller business can go for growth with far fewer of its traditional disadvantages.

As a London Business School survey showed, however, many small companies aren't keen on expansion. Even among those who were, a quarter of the study lived by the philosophy : 'I am very keen to expand the business and then find a buyer to buy me out' (which happened to the conference centre company, Style).

Though others say that 'I am very keen to expand the business and continue to run it myself' takeover may still be the end-result. That's no tragedy. Even if the entrepreneur doesn't stay on, making one small fortune provides the wherewithal to start on the road to another - and there's always another road.

Effective management versus efficient management

Are you efficient or are you effective? If you don’t know the difference, then you have not imbibed one of the basic lessons taught by Peter Drucker - by all odds the wisest and most widely followed management thinker of his day. That’s a long day indeed. Now in his 90s, Drucker reckons to have spent 65 years as a consultant, teaching managers, not how to do things right (efficiency), but how to do the right things(effectiveness).

The distinction governs his marvellously lucid writing as well. His powers of analysis and understanding are essentially pragmatic, directing his readers towards behaviours that will make a significant difference to their own work and their organisations. For example, which personality type makes the best chief executive? Should you go for an extrovert or a near-recluse? For an easy-going practitioner of laissez-faire management or a control freak? For a generous person or one who is parsimonious?

Most people would plump for an easy-going, generous extrovert, but with reservations: successful CEOs include not a few reclusive, penny-pinching misers who seek to control everything and everybody. The reservations, according to Drucker, are right. Writing in the Harvard Business Review (June 2004), he says that the best CEOs he encountered in those 65 years were ‘all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths and weaknesses’. They were, however, remarkably similar in their behaviours. The key to effectiveness lies in eight of the latter. The winning CEOs…

• asked ‘what needs to be done?’
• asked ‘what is right for the enterprise?’
• developed action plans
• took responsibility for decisions
• took responsibility for communicating
• focused on opportunities rather than problems
• ran productive meetings
• thought and said ‘we’ rather than ‘I’

HOW DO YOU RATE?

How does your own boss (if any) match up to the Eight Elements of Effectiveness? For that matter, how do you? The ineffective manager at any level doesn’t draw up action plans to achieve identified needs; avoids making decisions as long as possible (which may be forever); doesn’t communicate; is beset with (and besets others with) problems; wastes the long time spent in meetings; and uses ‘I’ far more often than ‘we’. That’s hardly surprising, given that their concern for what’s right for the enterprise is subjugated to the more immediate question, ‘what’s right for me?’.

Asking the wrong question is virtually certain to generate the wrong answer - and the wrong behaviour. That word is heard much less often than ‘culture’. But you need to ask why any organisation actually requires to change or reform its culture. The answer is surely to get improved behaviour. Creating a culture that favours entrepreneurial innovation is not an end in itself. But getting people to behave like entrepreneurs and innovators will of itself change the culture in the desired way.

I recently visited three companies, all highly innovative and entrepreneurial, but with wholly different cultures. One retained the characteristics of its relatively recent birth as a high-tech start-up; the culture was permeated through and through by its dependence on winning and retaining customers through more and more advanced technological solutions to their problems and needs. The behaviours that created this culture had been perpetuated by this clear, essential and forceful purpose.

PURPOSE, NOT MISSION

I prefer that word ‘purpose’ to ‘mission’ and ‘vision’ because it enshrines the same positive pragmatism that Drucker preaches. His first element of effectiveness, as noted, is to ask ‘what needs to be done?’ At another of my three recent visits, much the same enquiry was phrased differently by the directors: ‘what is this company for?’ Either way, you end up with a purpose - a clear statement of what has to be done and why. In the case of this second company, advanced technological progress was again indispensable, but this time as a guarantee of economic production of brands capable of bearing a premium price.

The culture therefore hinged on behaviours that persuaded consumers to support this strategy. That need applied across the board - from manufacture to marketing, from finance to retail premises. Behaviour is conditioned by the products, the consumer experience and the retail heartland. Like the high-tech company, this one is customer-focused because there is no sensible alternative - and, in any event, this focus on the consumer was built into the company at its foundation more than a century ago, and had been maintained by its traditions.

These include private family ownership, which excludes certain behaviours - like worrying about the analysts who pontificate on a company’s performance and its share price, for example. Nor can the top managers seek to maximise their personal wealth by maximising the share price. Both these factors are highly pernicious, and are no answer to Drucker’s second question: ‘what is right for the enterprise?’

He stresses that effective executives do not ‘ask if it’s right for the owners, the stock price, the employees, or the executives...they also know that a decision that isn’t right for the enterprise will ultimately not be right for any of the stakeholders’. In the third of the three firms that I visited, the sovereignty of the enterprise is especially evident, since the business is a creature of the British state, managed at arm’s length, and in the process of designing its own destiny.

The entire workforce, from the top to the bottom, is dedicated, not so much to changing its culture, more to building one - much of it from scratch. There’s a foundation in the scientific purpose for which the firm was setup. But the management is in the rare position of being able to develop behaviours without any significant influences from the past. On my observation, Drucker’s eight simple elements are being faithfully followed, which explains and perpetuates an evident and enjoyable addiction to purposeful change.

TWO TASKS AT A TIME

There is, of course, more to the Eight Elements than the basic principles. Thus, ‘what needs to be done’, observes Drucker, ‘almost always contains more than one urgent task’. Human beings, so psychologists say, cannot cope mentally with more than seven things at once.

But in his vast experience, Peter Drucker has ‘never encountered an executive who remains effective while tackling more than two tasks at a time’. The effective approach is therefore to prioritise - only moving on to the next urgent task when the most urgent is completed. This is one aspect of Drucker’s article that needs some qualification. Certain tasks are continuous and never go away - recruitment and promotion, for supreme example. This function should be a constant preoccupation of executives with hire-and-fire power.

If you don’t have the right people in the right slots, other priorities, no matter how urgent, are likely to be mismanaged. Of course, replacing people and filling new roles can sometimes be urgent. But that’s often because the management has failed to give this vital function timely attention.

As it happens, the Eight Elements are very useful in this context. Use the eight as a checklist when taking references (which is never to be neglected), or when rating the qualities of internal candidates. Normally both activities are random and highly subjective. The referee, for instance, chats to you about the person concerned and answers your general questions about their personality and performance. But any negative reply to specific questions on someone’s application of the Eight is an obvious No-No. Would you want to employ a senior person who didn’t take responsibility for decisions or couldn’t run a meeting properly?

Drucker pays particular attention to meetings, on the very reasonable grounds that, according to survey after survey, executives (even junior managers and professionals) spend more than half of every day with others - and he rightly regards a one-on-one talk as ameeting. But there are meetings and meetings. If you want yours to be effective, always ask yourself what kind of meeting is proposed. Is its task…

• to prepare a statement, an announcement or a press release?
• to make an announcement (Drucker lists as example an organisational change)?
• to consider a report by one person?
• to consider reports by several or all of those present?
• to inform the executive who called the meeting?
• to stage a get-together with the leader?

MEETING WITH PURPOSE

You fit the meeting to the purpose. So for the first type, you make sure that somebody drafts the statement before the meeting: and after discussion has finalised the text, somebody must take charge of circulating the agreed words. But what you never do, whatever the nature of the meeting, is to allow inconclusive and rambling debate. Stick to the point of the meeting, and call time when the purpose has been accomplished. Model yourself on Drucker’s favourite executive (‘the most effective...I have ever known’): Alfred Sloan, the true founder of General Motors, and the father of the modern ‘concept of the corporation’.

That’s the title of the book which spread the message of modern management and made Drucker’s reputation. Sloan, who had given the author unprecedented access to GM, disliked the book and was stimulated to write his own My Years with General Motors as a kind of rebuttal. But Drucker’s esteem for Sloan is plainly undimmed. He recounts how Sloan spent three days a week ‘in formal meetings with a set membership’ and another three days in informal meetings with individual executives or small groups.

Sloan started by stating the purpose (that word again) of the meeting. Like John D. Rockefeller I (who would listen lying on a couch with his eyes shut), Sloan ‘rarely spoke except to clarify a confusing point’ and never took notes. Both giants, however, listened intently and remembered what they heard - as proved by their pithy follow-up memos. One from Sloan, sent to all present, would summarise the discussion and its conclusions and record any work decided on, with deadline and name of the executive assigned to it.

THE NINTH ELEMENT

Sloan thus exemplifies the Ninth Element of the effective executive, added by Drucker as a ‘bonus’, but so important that he elevates it to a sovereign rule: LISTEN FIRST, SPEAK LAST. This bonus is slightly puzzling. If it is so valuable, why did this behaviour not make the list in the first place? For that matter, why did picking people (one of Sloan’s supreme skills, as it happens) not figure in the Elements of Effectiveness?

Great executives finally prove their effectiveness by the quality of the businesses and managements that they leave behind. This was a test which Sloan and Rockefeller passed with flying colours - and which many other leaders fail lamentably. At Coca-Cola Roberto Goizueta, by concentrating on adding more value, helped boost the share price by 3,800% in 16 years. But his successor lasted little more than two years as the shares dropped 9%. And the next man up had another two-year reign: the shares fell 5%.

Fortune attributes the failures to incompetence amid an atmosphere of intrigue and jealousies - in other words, bad behaviours. Obeying the Nine Elements yourself, which Goizueta may well have done, gets you nowhere unless you also insist that everybody else behaves likewise - and, if they can’t, they must leave. Otherwise your personal effectiveness will be dragged down by their failures, to nobody’s benefit at all.

The Chief Executive Officer - end of the empire?

The passing of the CEO has been announced. To be more precise, a particular type of chief executive is allegedly dwindling unto death - the type that one non-executive director calls ‘the Imperial CEO’. But since the Imperial (and imperious) description applies to so many top bosses, the distinction hardly matters. What’s really important is (a) whether the dwindling report – carried in Business Week - is correct and (b), if so, what the consequences will to be for managers in businesses and other organisations of all shapes and sizes.

I often use big corporations for illustrative purposes, because their doings, for good or ill, are highly visible, and, anyway, their key faults and virtues are generally those of the small organisation writ large. Thus, for managers who aren’t CEOs and don’t work for major outfits, the Cult of the Imperial Chief Executive still had and has highly important effects. Right down the world’s business ranks - in particular the Anglo-Saxon world - the Cult marked the zenith of a management theory as old as management.

ONLY ONE PERSON

The theory answers a fundamental question for any organisation: ‘Who’s in charge here?’ - or WICH? For short. The Imperial CEO, just like the autocratic boss of a family business, provides the simplest possible answer; only one person is in charge, and you know who that is, don’t you? The issue is obvious and grave.

Can one person truly exercise untrammelled power over all aspects of any organisation without adversely affecting its performance and behaviours?

According to that BW report, though, it’s no longer possible to give that old single answer of a single person in charge. Power has shifted to the ‘watchdogs’, non-executive directors, auditors and lawyers. These people ‘are playing a bigger role in fundamental management decisions about business strategy, acquisitions, succession planning, crisis response and what can be booked as earnings’. So who is in charge? These watchdogs are not players, but referees and linesmen. The work of management can only be done by managers - and in the West that overwhelmingly means a pyramid narrowing all the way to the apex.

It doesn’t have to be so. The answer to the WICH? question can be plural. A group of people can form the top management - partners perhaps, or maybe an executive team, who work collectively at sharing decisions and responsibilities, and combine their workloads to produce effective overall operations. This is the way most businesses begin life. It’s also the basic principle of the manufacturing cell, a key element in modern shop floor management.

There’s no reason why what works in the factory should not prove just as sound in the boardroom - and just as superior to traditional approaches. Moreover, a genuinely plural management provides a better fit for all those watchdogs. And their role is indispensable. You can’t leave top management to be judge and jury over vital questions like these:

• Does management have a robust, doable strategy, supported throughout the company, that promises a high and rising return on capital over the next five years?

• Do all acquisition plans pass the Economic Value Added test (i.e., the yield on the buy will exceed the cost of the capital expended, which includes the cost of equity)?

• Has succession planning put top-class heirs-apparent in place for all key roles, including the summit of that pyramid?

• Is financial performance reported fully and fairly, both within the organisation, and to the outside world?

CROSS-EXAMINATION

Moreover, to fulfil their onerous responsibility, the watchdogs can’t just cross-examine the chief executive (especially an Imperial one).

Health checks are a plural process which tends to encourage plural management. But there’s a catch here; pluralism doesn’t fit with the long-prevailing universal template - the military model. Army commands have single leaders, and their reach is just as imperial as that of any power-hungry corporate czar.

The commitment of mighty forces has always depended for its outcome on the leadership strengths, strategic intelligence and tactical expertise of a clearly appointed supreme leader - who, you hoped, was as mighty as his army.

Where that hope proved to be mistaken, the result was execution of the failed leader (in Stalin’s horrible case, the execution was often literal).

The removal of failed leaders remains a standard piece of management control theory. Indeed, BW’s report on the dwindling power of the top boss is largely based on the toppling of famous figures like Michael Eisner of Walt Disney, Harry Stone cypher of Boeing, Hank Greenberg of the AIG insurance empire, and Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard. The latter’s demise followed five years of an ultimately ruinous career at the top. However, BW ties her forced departure to a very specific issue.

The HP Board wanted the Chief Technology Officer to run the company’s ailing $30 billion corporate computer businesses. Fiorina refused on two grounds. (1) Specific - she didn’t agree with the choice. (2) General - Making such an appointment, she argued, was her role, not the Board’s. She was absolutely right. That’s the heart of the matter. The chief executive’s prime job is to appoint and direct the members of executive management. Nobody can do this from outside the executive.

That rule applies whether the management is plural or singular. True, as noted above, non-executives have an overall duty to see that succession is properly planned. And every important appointment should, of course, be discussed with non-executives before the die is cast. Their objections, if any, should be taken into account as well. But ultimately hiring and firing, and appointment and disappointment, are not their business.

Confronting ineffective management of the executive is a very different matter. This is clearly the business of the Board, but it’s a task which has been honoured in the breach rather than the observance. CEOs (like Fiorina) have been cherished rather than chastised over long periods of mismanagement. Non-executives too easily get seduced by the dynamism and charisma of the Imperial boss. But the issues of failure in strategic management or operations, though, they should predominate, are not generally the cases which cause watchdogs to bark - and bite.

IMPROPER MATTERS

The fatal vices concern matters such as ‘loan sales improperly booked over a technical issue’, ‘accounting problems’, ‘investigation of company financial controls’, ‘a write-down on troubled assets’, ‘transactions with Chairman’, ‘having an affair with another executive’, etc.

These matters definitely reflect impropriety, but they don’t necessarily condemn the executive effectiveness of a company, or impugn the conduct of most of its members.

Improper financial direction is unquestionably a threat; but by far the greatest threat to the health and wealth of the business is simple, non-financial mismanagement. Here the watchdogs have very restricted powers. Not only is it hard to find out what’s going on, but it’s harder still to change it. For instance, is the new man at General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, right to launch GE on a vast project to change a money machine into a marketing colossus?

Immelt has turned his back on many aspects of the legendary 20-year regime of his predecessor, Jack Welch, in this effort to create a giant corporation far better attuned to the fast-moving, innovation-led markets of the 21st century. But one underpinning of the Welch decades remains firmly in place. Everything hinges on the Man. This is ‘the Immelt Revolution’, according to a lead page that mentions the chief revolutionary eight times. If this isn’t an Imperial regime, it certainly reads that way. But what has Immelt actually done?

• Emphasis on bottom-line results, a GE speciality under Welch, has been downgraded.

• Bonus payments are now also linked to new ideas, customer satisfaction and growth in sales.

• In 18 months $5 billion has been invested in 80 projects under the title ‘Imagination Breakthroughs’; the hope is for $25 billion in revenue by 2007.

• Executives are to be rotated less often, and are now expected to become experts in the industries they serve - not just effective general managers.

• More outsiders are being imported, many of them to beef up sales and marketing.

• Over $60 billion has been spent on new businesses including media content (Universal), biosciences (the UK’s Amersham), security, water and renewable energy (wind farms, etc).

TAKEN ON TRUST

In other words, the new man has done a lot. Most of his plans and decisions, however, have necessarily been taken on trust by GE’s watchdogs. That’s the nature of management, which is an experimental activity. You can’t be sure of the pay-off from buying Amersham, or new linkages for bonus payments, or an ‘Imagination Breakthrough’ by ‘overhauling the brand image of3,000 consumer-finance locations’ (surely neither very imaginative nor much of a breakthrough). Maybe the new initiatives will work, probably some of them won’t. By the time you find out which, it will be too late.

But you can say that Immelt has embarked on a set of interrelated programmes, based on a logical and well-researched interpretation of present and future trends, and all aimed at an ambitious corporate target – a minimum annual organic growth rate of 8%, up from5% in the past decade. Nor is the CEO taking inordinate risks, or ‘betting the company’. At $152 billion of sales, GE is too big to bet. So for now, the boardroom watchdogs can’t do much except clap their hands, but they and Jack Welch (who hand-picked Immelt after years of carefully planning his own succession) do have reason for self-congratulation - so far.

Interestingly, Welch’s role in Immelt’s choice runs counter to an argument put forward by BW in its account of the diminishing powers of the boss: ‘CEOs are losing the power to anoint their successors, a practice that sometimes allowed insecure leaders to make sure they were never threatened by a high-performing No.2’ Actually, the greater risk is that the Imperial wizard will subconsciously look for a weak successor who will never outshine him. As the magazine admits, though, ‘Many of history’s great CEOs...were handpicked by the leaders they replaced’.

To Welch, the risks are worth running to have a chance of finding a super boss like - well, himself. Other directors, he thinks, should stay out of the selection process: ‘There is an increasing desire for boards to take these newfound responsibilities and move into areas where they don’t belong’. So who’s right? Should the outgoing boss decide on the successor or not?

FACT-BASED MANAGEMENT

As I wrote above, management is by its very nature experimental. In experiments, the proof of the pudding is always in the eating. If it works, that’s probably good management. If not, it definitely isn’t. You tip the balance in your favour partly by taking pains (as in ‘fact-based management’ or in Welch’s lengthy process which finally gave the crown to Immelt). And, like any good scientist, you watch the experiment carefully to judge the actions and the results. Which of these ideas are not worth testing - and right now?

• Form a radical, ambitious, achievable plan to achieve greater growth and increased profitability over the next few years

• Decide, in the light of that plan, where you want your managers to concentrate their efforts

• Use financial incentives and all management forums and processes to point those efforts in the desired direction

• Place ‘soft’ targets, like generating new ideas, on a par with ‘hard’ objectives, like meeting budgets

• Launch many new projects, and involve all managers in the planning and success of the business

• Look hard for fixed ideas, traditions, rules and procedures, etc. that block progress - and kill them

• Make sure that you are investing in the growth markets of the future, not the cash cows of the past

If people ignore or dismiss such powerful principles (abstracted from the ‘Immelt Revolution’ at GE, but applicable to any business), you want the watchdogs to ask why - loud and clear - before bad figures show bad consequences. A well conceived and executed policy like the above, however, should make managers immune from watchdog interference - with one key proviso. Once dishonest, unethical conduct comes in, so one day will failure. Managers not only need all the moral reinforcement they can get from outside. They also need to be their own toughest watchdogs.

Management Styles

Management styles vary from company to company. There are many different styles of management that can bring success to an organisation but you have to make sure your management style is right for your business.

People skills are obviously a key asset in the development of effective management styles. Dealing with people is a professional skill in itself. Being able to see from the perspective of others is essential, and caring for their welfare is also of prime importance.

There are many high-profile examples of how to develop a successful management style. Managers like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have famously developed their own distinctive management style from which others can learn.

However, the fact that the two examples are very different management styles shows that there is no single route to success.

Gates's style and management practice at Microsoft was based on control and concerning himself with detail almost to the point of obsession. The onus that the Bill Gates management style placed on the monitoring of staff and figures is demonstrated by the fact that he even used to sign expenses for Steve Ballmer, his right-hand man.

Buffett, on the other hand, always stressed a desire for the managers of Berkshire Hathaway to think like owners. He urged them to ‘look at the business you run as if it were the only asset of your family, one that must be operated for the next 50 years and can never be sold’.

Sometimes unorthodox management behaviour can develop into a very effective management style. A case in point is that of Ricardo Semler and his Brazilian engineering company Semco. His management policies included unusual practices such as shutting down the company for an afternoon twice-yearly for all employees to clean out the places where they work. He also limited all memos and reports to one piece of A4, always topped by an eye-catching tabloid-style headline to sum up the key message.

Perhaps most interestingly of all, he implemented a system where employees would assess their own managers, with a low rating putting the manager’s job at risk.

All this reinforces the view that there is no one right way to manage people. While taking tips from the experts can help you find the management style that works for you, it is ultimately a matter of trial and error, trust and heresy.

Total Quality: TQM, business process reengineering and successful management

Quality is a word from which few managers can hope to escape for long these days. That's not quality meaning 'goodness, beauty, luxury, brightness or excellence' (to quote guru Philip Crosby), nor even meaning a product free from fault. Fault-free products result from true quality, though: paying unceasing attention to the continuous, measured improvement of all processes - those of service as much as manufacture - and responding fully to feedback from those being served.

Managers must lead this improvement in more senses than one: for management is a service itself. Unlike the lilies of the field, managers do toil, but they don't do much in the way of spinning. However, their toil is as susceptible to improvement as anybody else's, starting at the straightforward levels (very important in quality work) of on-time performance and responsiveness. Thus one top manager, compiling a list of personal quality criteria, included punctual arrival at meetings and answering his phone within five rings.

He asked for feedback on his quality performance from colleagues. At first, they looked at him askance. But before long, they were all using similar lists. Consequently, one day everybody arrived for a 9am meeting by 8.45. So they started there and then - and finished before the meeting had officially begun. Don't imagine that such standards are trivial. One chief executive we worked with was apparently unreachable by phone, thought nothing of arriving half-an-hour late without apology (even for meetings with outsiders present), and often paid no attention to his subordinates' proposals.

By no coincidence, that man nearly ruined the company with awful one-man decisions. He was rightly deposed. The better boss with his checklist had grasped two essential truths. First, just as athletes can raise their games, every manager can raise his or her own quality of management in ways which are instantly apparent to others: and on which others are the best source of help. Second, all quality programmes must be led from the top: personal example reinforces the initiation and follow-through on which success depends - and success has eluded all too many earnest seekers after quality.

That's partly because they haven't emulated one successful seeker, the Belgian steel-wire firm, Bekaert, which began its total quality programme, not on the shopfloor, but in the boardroom. As any honest director will tell you, many companies pay more attention to the quality of the board's lunch than to that of its processes. What's the purpose of the meetings? Is it the right purpose? Does the process enable the right purpose to be translated into effective action in the speediest, most efficient way?

Further, how is the board helping the managers to change from giving orders to 'counselling groups, providing resources for them, helping them think for themselves'. Though that's General Electric's Jack Welch speaking about the future, this is no pie in the 21st century sky. It's a precise description of the manager's role, at all levels, in quality companies with genuine quality of management. That in turn depends on listening to what everybody involved in the whole activity has to say.

Then you enlist their support - as in total quality management (TQM) and business process reengineering (BPR) - in devising and implementing better ways of getting results. James Champy blames failures in BPR, not on poor support lower down, but on 'poor alignment of management.' Three of his colleagues expand on what this means:

'The changes inherent in reengineering - the reinvention of the company around key processes like order fulfilment, for example - are so radical that they cannot happen without the cooperation of all the major functions in the company that are affected by the effort.'

Before that alignment can even be launched, however, you've got to get 'absolute agreement' from the executive team on a couple of key issues. They need a vision of how the company will operate in the future 'so powerful that it creates a competitive advantage in the marketplace.' That vision also must be 'so strong that it motivates the team to bridge the unknown gulf from the current ways of operating to the compelling new view of the business.'

The team must also be dissatisfied with the present...'The team must have the common view that the current way of doing business will weaken - perhaps even put at risk - the company's future.' The two-part necessity is no different from Geoff Cooke's formula for lifting the England XV from the slough of the Eighties to its unprecedented run of success. It hinges on involving people in efforts to achieve improvement, by asking for their help and paying attention to their concerns.

That's the essence of TQM. Companies engaged in TQM may well embrace all the other fashionable waves in management technology: especially BPR, and the closely related benchmarking, which seeks to match or excel the best standards in any other organisation for particular processes. All these approaches lead to various forms of participative management, in which the entire team tackles problems and comes up with solutions - and results.

The operative word, again, is 'results'. There have been all too many management fashions, fads and theories; but total quality differs in kind, not least in this emphasis on achievement. That's not all. Unlike, say, Management by Objectives (with which there are similarities), total quality is a philosophy, built around attending to, responding to and using the talents of individuals, alone and in teams. Unlike most philosophies, though, total quality is eminently practical.

Put like that, how can any sentient manager argue against the quality ideals? They can't: which means that opposition has to centre on the practice, and on the several TQM failures - notoriously, two American prizewinners, Florida Light & Power and Wallace, which fell flat on their TQM faces. But specific failure doesn't invalidate a management philosophy, any more than specific success validates a theory.

TQM, though, doesn't purport to be theoretical. It's a practical methodology for continuously improving all business processes. But does that include the processes which determine the future of the firm? At both the US quality flops, top management took fundamentally wrong decisions. However much every process in the business has been improved, the higher ecehelons can swamp all the gains with, say, one ill-advised 'strategic' swoop - or gross tactical error.

Thus, Business Week reports that the vacuum systems unit at Varian Associates improved on-time delivery from 42% to 92%. The pressure to meet the deadlines, though, stopped the staff from answering phone calls from customers, who retaliated by taking away market share. As it happens, failure to reply to phone calls and letters (the ultimate in inattention and unresponsiveness) is a common and especially infuriating fault of many companies which avow their dedication to quality. But that isn't the most serious form of inattention. Why wasn't customer satisfaction being properly tracked?

The same question can be asked of Federal Express, a quality prize-winner, which also put the emphasis on speed - with the result that misdirection of parcels rose as promptness improved. Each error cost a disastrous $50 to correct. At another delivery operation, United Parcels Service, the drivers were also hustled for speed, only to find that customers valued talks with the drivers more than speed, and that the harrassed fellows no longer had the time to talk.

Unless attention is properly directed, management can't know what the customer or the employee wants, or what the latter can do in response to the former's needs. Moreover, while the three companies no doubt involved employees in making the abortive changes, none of them (unlike Sir Colin Marshall at British Airways) made sure that somebody consulted the operatives about the value of the changes to the customer. Unless management quality is much higher than in these cases, the best-intentioned of quality efforts must misfire.

As noted, some leaders (not only Bekaert, but Motorola) have recognised this from the start, beginning with an exercise on the quality of the board and its working processes. Others (like Royal Mail) have included crucial areas, like how they determine strategy, later in the day. Sooner (very preferably) or later, the top must right itself, if top people sincerely want successful reform. But whether they change themselves or not, and whether they're driven by logic or customer insistence or (foolishly) fashion, many more boardrooms will be choosing some kind of quality route.

That being so, managers had better brush up their quality knowledge. They're likely to need it for the sake of their careers - and for that of the whole British economy. Poor attention to customers, employees and processes, and inadequate response to clear evidence of deficiency in all three areas, has had predictably bad consequences for economic growth. That is almost taken for granted: not one eyebrow was raised by an unpublished DTI report that found British manufacturing's management to be inferior - along with its products and productivity.

That was in 1993. But the same message has been delivered by report after report ever since the Second World War ended: even during the war, so Corelli Barnett's research has found, manufacturers were steeped in sin. Is the sin original? Does some genetic disorder in the British, their education system, their class structure or their history doom their factories to incompetent management? That theory is no more valid than the idea that English rugby teams could never beat those from the Southern hemisphere.

Our visits to several companies have uncovered managements which, by modern, intelligent and hard-working means, have improved operations to world-class standards. Some are service companies, but that doesn't affect the issue. The proportion of 'manufacturing' employees actually engaged in manufacture has fallen even faster than the share of manufacturing in the total economy. The fact remains that individual managers and firms, within the overall gloom, shine out - and would shine in any country.

A possible argument, however, is that the supply of able, attentive, responsive managers is so limited that a few lucky employers nab the best, while most companies make do with dross. That theory requires a corollary: that too much talent (of which Britain must have the normal share) gets siphoned off into other sectors. Finance and the civil service are the usual candidates. But confidence is not inspired by the City's long record of disasters - like spending £400 million on a Stock Exchange computer system that never worked, and never could.

As for the civil servants, the summit of their profession is the Treasury, which can't escape its share of blame for the national under-performance. The mandarins, true, can fairly blame the politicians - which leaves hardly any sectors where the brightest and best can claim the brightest and best results. In sport, though, you rapidly learn that making excuses and blaming others doesn't win matches. The same is true in economics. What distinguishes the world-class, right-stuff Britons is that their companies are pointed in the right direction.

That will have been achieved by successful leaders who, both inside and outside the organisation, have asked, listened and taken action. There's no other way of developing the correct ends and means, of developing focused, motivated and productive people who agree to the ends and have mastered the means. If the players/managers either don't know what's expected of them, or disagree with the demands, or can't cope with those demands, the side/company will be defeated.

In business, if the whole organisation is heading fast down the wrong lane of the motorway - a bank over-lending to property companies, say, or a government defending sterling at DM2.95 - nobody's reputation will survive the crash. The trouble is that, much too often, crashes appear to be required before organisations alter course: just as so often its only humiliation that spurs sportsmen to mend their losing ways. For instance, Rolls-Royce Motors in 1993 pushed through a praiseworthy drive to modernise its methods and reduce its costs - but only under the spur of horrendous losses that had nigh crippled its parent, Vickers.

The actions that had become desperately essential were always desirable. Why weren't they desired - and done? The answer is that, with sales topping 3,000 lush Rollers annually, as they once did lush profits also rolled in. But what if the reform programme had been executed during those good times? With the breakeven point forced down to the present much lower levels, Rolls-Royce would have generated the cash to finance what was equally essential for long-term survival: new model development.

British products and productivity have fallen behind, not because managers were unable to keep them ahead, but because they weren't asked to do so by 'the company'. But what's the company? Other, more senior managers. It's far better for them to be embarrassed into changing direction by impertinent juniors than by incontinent losses. Pay attention to those actually doing the work, and you will invariably find that major savings are possible.

James Champy cites an insurance company which took 24 days to issue a standard policy. The actual process needed between 10 and 30 minutes. The delay arose because 13 to 14 HQ departments took a hand in the transaction. Another set of departments in the field also got involved. And overlaying functions were required simply to find out where the policy had got to in its meandering journey around the organisation. Had their heads been put (or knocked) together, everyone involved would surely have perceived the system's total nonsense

Total quality argues that, once inefficiency has been spotted, it must be eliminated. In most companies that doesn't always happen, of course. Departmental bosses can dig their heels in and protest that nothing in the defective process can be changed without endangering the whole company. In fact, that's what's at stake - the whole company. Such horrors don't happen in isolation. They are symptoms of systemic failure and have to be treated as such. Tracing the problem back, TQM-style, to root causes will surely unveil a counter-productive culture of checking and double-checking, overmanning and over-regulation, bureaucracy and form-filling.

Champy won't countenance any of that: 'There should be only three levels of hierarchy in a reengineered organisation.' At the top are the enterprise managers. Below them are the people/process managers, who control the rest - all of them 'self-managers'. There may also be 'expertise managers' responsible for specific areas, mostly to do with technology of all kinds. In other words, the reengineer seeks to install an organisational form radically different from any that's likely to exist - we recently worked in one insurance company, for example, which had 15 levels of hierarchy.

But where does reengineering stop? What if the standard insurance policy is an inferior product? What if the range of policies being offered is too narrow - or too broad? What if the whole sales operation is geared to maximising turnover and commissions, rather than to fundamental values? The last question is especially painful for British insurers, which in their rush to grab personal pension business notoriously unleashed armies of ill-trained ruffians who misled the customers. The result has been, not only acute embarrassment, but heavy fines and the very real threat of huge compensation payments.

If strategies are misplaced, the company will fall into the trap of doing the wrong thing for the wrong purpose: even if that's done in the right way, little good will result. That's what happens to companies, to use a Champy phrase, which are not 'living in the future.' The greatest danger of even the best reengineering is that managers will concentrate so hard and so proudly on the present operations which they're changing so radically that they will succumb to management's biggest weakness: living in the present, and sometimes in the past,

To break away from that mind-set, though, requires no less a sea-change in attitudes than TQM. The criticism and professed disillusion with both TQM and BPR really stem from reluctance to undertake top-to-toe revision of the corporate being. Without question, the analytical skills and executive ability needed to manage British firms to world-class standards exist in quantity. By the same token, there was seldom any shortage of top-class players in the long doldrums of English Rugby. If the quality doesn't match the quantity, it's because leaders haven't got the best from the highly capable and usually experienced people around them. Being truly attentive and responsive to other managers (and to everybody else in the business system) is the essence of interaction and the precondition of top management's own success.

Communication Skills: The art of coaching and motivation

Great coaches no doubt differ in their styles as much as great athletes. But the coaches must all have eone thing in common: they are great communicators. It isn't just a question of seeing what the athlete must do, but of persuading the athlete to do it. Anybody who has seen Frank Dick speak on a public platform will bear witness to his skills as communicator to several hundred people: his skill at one-to-one communication also played a crucial role, not only in developing individual world champions, but in revitalising British athletics as a whole.

Today most people remember only the long string of glorious successes during Dick's reign as national coach - the middle-distance triumphs of Coe, Cram and Ovett, the sprinting of Christie and Regis, the decathlons of Daley Thomson, the hurdling of Gunnell and Jackson, the javelin throwing of Whitbread and Backley, and many, many more. At the start, though, the international standing of British athletics was even lower than that of English rugby when Geoff Cooke took charge.

Victory in the European Cup seemed as far away then as the World Cup final did to the rugby players before Cooke unfolded his vision. In an athletics competition, though, the coach has to form a team by blending highly individualistic athletes, who actually compete with each other in their individual events, and only combine for relays. Working with different captains, Dick achieved miracles of communication in the big international competitions: spectators could feel the team spirit that was evoked and which plainly reinforced the athletes' own will to win.

Dick's prowess as coach and communicator has been widely recognised outside athletics. He has worked with such intense competitors as Boris Becker and Gerhard Berger, together with, most recently, a number of rugny players. Dick's years of experience have coalesced into startlingly simple, but far too infrequently applies, principles for coaching others to achieve success. He starts by denying a popular belief - that 'you have a coach or you hire a coach, and that's it for life. It's not like that.'

What is coaching then? Dick's answer comes not from sport, but from a wedding. 'I'd coached a boy who married a girl called Beatrice, the daughter of a titled Cuban family. I went to their wedding, and she said, "Frank. I wish you in life the strength to give your children the only two gifts that you can." Now I've got two daughters, and I thought it's going to be expensive.' Dick asked if Beatrice were talking about a BMW or something: the answer was, 'the only two gifts you must give them are the roots to grow and the wings to fly.'

At a stroke, this young woman had summed up the entire development process. Dick believes that, whether it's a coach working with an athlete, a parent with children, a teached with pupils, managers with their staff, it's the same. 'At the end of the day, when the athlete goes out into the arena, whether it's a Twickenham or Wimbledon, the athlete is making a total statement for himself or herself. It's their statement. The coach cannot be involved at that point. '

To Dick, the 'worst possible thing' is to see athletes looking up into the stand for their coaches, 'because you know they are not concentrating 100%. They should be out there owning the whole problem.' The job of the coach, or the manager, or the parent is to 'get into other people the strength to do the growing.' The mentor spends time on directing and coaching to achieve precisely that - 'the part of the process you've got to get into them.'

The next stage tests the coach as much as the player. 'Once they've started to grow, and they're growing strong, there comes a point when you've not only got to have the skills, but the courage to push them away from you, to let them spread their wings. If you don't, you're hanging on to their wings, and you will hold them down.' Dick makes the analogy with the child learning to walk: 'finally there's a stage where you let them fall and let them pick themselves up.'

Everybody must go through these stages. Dick is adamant that 'you can't have a coach, a manager or whatever who never lets that person fall over.' The motive for holding on may be love, or the mentor's own dependency on the other person's dependency. 'There are parents, coaches, managers who don't really want the person to be able to spread his wings, otherwise they themselves don't feel needed any more.' They feel that their world has collapsed, 'that there's nothing more for you.'

Many managers have challenged Dick on this issue. 'If we make these guys good, what's in it for us for the future?' His answer is that, if their own superiors 'see that you can manufacture two, three or four of you, you're golddust.' Dick's point is that any of the good guys might leave: but the boss won't 'want to lose you, because you can make more of you, and that's critical.' As he says, the work of the coach - in management as in athletics - 'is central to the whole business.'

The process is 'on-going, dynamic, changing, developing.' The philosophy of 'grab them and hold them for good' doesn't work. When presenting to managers, Dick takes a quite different line; he usually tells his audiences that, 'at the end of the day, the greatest compliment you can ever have as a manager, in the words of the Bette Midler song, is that "you're the wind beneath my wings." And that's it.' The manager/coach sees them spread their wings, smiles, and moves on to something else.

To Dick's mind, a good coach always takes his athletes through a definite process. Mistakes will be made along the way, but belief in the process, as well as the outcome, is crucial. How do you nurture the roots and grow the wings? When people first come to a coach, 'they are really pretty excited, because you represent the possiblity of fulfilling their ambitions.' Giving them motivation or confidence therefore isn't that important. Here Dick uses a coaching style that he calls 'directing.'

The communication leaves no room for argument. You set the rules, saying 'this is how you'll train on a Tuesday and Wednesday. I'll expect you to do this and this and this. Here's your programme - off you go. These are the rules that I live by.' The next stage is that motivation goes down. Confidence has started to rise, because of the coaching process, but 'the fact is that no-one in life ever improves as fast as they think they should.' As motivation consequently slackens, the mentor's style shifts from directing to 'coaching'.

This style, says Dick, is 'a little bit softer.' He will give the athlete more help in fitting into the rules: 'I'll put demands on you, and then I'll help you to fit in.' At both the first two stages, though, Dick is in control. But then the athlete crosses a 'magic line' and enters stage three: 'Hey, I can see where I'm going now. I know where I'm going to get up. I've got my ambitions. I want to get there, and I want to get there fast.'

Mentors have to understand the peaks and troughs of this process. 'Motivation pops up and down with successes and not so much motivation.' Performance, says Dick, goes up in steps: 'if you're going to develop people properly, there are going to be periods of stability, acceleration, stability. In much the same way as you have day and night, and you need to sleep and recover and regenerate, you need to push the work in, and you need this balance all the time.' Stage four has arrived.

At this point, the coach gives up the reins: 'you are very much in control, and I support what you are going.' Then comes the dénouement: 'Finally motivation is up, confidence is up, and I am simply there to give advice when you need me.' The coach is now a counsellor, and the four-stage process is complete, with the first two providing the roots and the second two the wings. 'Having spread your wings, you come back to the nest or tree of whetever, whenever you need an expert.'

It takes great strength, as well as humility, for a coach to put so much into his people, and then sit back and allow them to take the glory. But Dick believes that 'the ability to control your ego is crucial in coaching. Ego must be controlled or the coach will never truly 'let go' of his pupils and will thereby stifle their true growth.' The ego problem for the coach arises if he wants to be high profile; then, 'of course, I'll always be looking over your shoulder when you're in the newspapers.'

But 'it can't work like that, because you'll never feel clear of me, and there'll be resentment of me at the end of the day.' That's why it's difficult to work with athletes who are really going to spread their wings - 'rough diamonds', in Dick's phrase. Their athletic resources are very precious (hence the diamond, but 'they want to be mountain people, to get out of the valley, not to be equated with anybody else in life - they want to be different.'

Rough diamonds don't fit into moulds: 'the rough parts don't allow that to happen.' That poses a challenge to the mentor: 'fitting you into a mould is desperately comfortable for me, because I can control you then.' That communicates the wrong message and contravenes the fundamental principles of the coaching process, which is 'not to control you, but to get the best out of you.' So the mould idea has to go. As for the rough parts, they'are fine, provided they don't hurt other people in the team.'

Dick doesn't mind the rough bits hurting him, 'but if they start hurting other people, so that you don't have cohesion at the end of the day, then you had better start chipping off the odd rough edge.' The target is performance: a coach must have the confidence to measure himself on the performance of his charges. The fact that coaches rarely receive the plaudits misses the point. A coach's raison d'étre is to nurture and courage a great performance.

Its achievement provides immense satisfaction to the mentor who has been a key contributor to the success. 'It's how you measure yourself - that's the critical thing. You look in the mirror - you're only accountable to one person, and that's you, the guy in the mirror. Was it your best shot?' Dick was extremely upset in 1987 when the press 'had done a bad number on me because of Linford Christie and Daley Thompson.' The decathlon hadn't gone Thompson's way: 'he was injured when he went into it, and the view was that he should not have competed.'

The major press onslaught, however, centred on Dick having fallen out with Christie. 'I came back home, and my head had gone down.' He remembered a quote, though - that 'it's not the critic who counts.' Dick's philosophy is that you must communicate honestly with yourself, asking 'did I give this my best shot? Would I have done it another way? Did I stand by my right set of principles? Did I put my ego in the way?' If the answers confirm that it truly was your best shot, well, 'there's nothing more you can do about it after that.'

Dick won't deny that he has 'an ego like anyone else', or that this raises difficulties. 'To start with, you think of coaching as a job, and because you see other people getting a spin-off from the work that you put in, I suppose it's tempting to think, "come on, let me got onto the front of the pitch". And I was spoiled really because, being the chief coach for Great Britain, I was going to get a better profile, anyway.' Vitally, though, what counts is 'where your ego fits in, and how you adjust to the position - what's right for the athlete or the team, as opposed to what's right for you.'

It helps, of course, to work with extremely talented athletes like Thompson, though, in fact, Dick wouldn't count the latter among the greatest talents he's met. Nor would he call talent the greatest constutent of success. Rather, success hinges of talent plus a mix of motivation and confidence. Too much talent can actually be a disadvantage, because everything comes too easily. You never learn to cope with failure, or what it feels like, because in your evolving years, everything is a success.

When Dick began his athletics career, he recalls, 70% of the gold medallists from the All England Schools' Championship had left the sport within three years. The cream of the crop gave up shortly after entering the harsh world of adult athletics. The outstanding, talented athlete who has won throughout his schooling comes up against the athlete with adequate talent, who has fought hard, won races, but also lost races, and probably has a healthier, more realistic experience of sport. Which has the better prospects?

The answer is obvious to Dick, but possibly not, he believes, to enough coaches - or enough athletes. All the great champions of Dick's time, like Thompson, Seb Coe, Steve Cram and Steve Ovett, had to fight their way through to the top. A great coach should look, not just for talent, but for motivation and passion. The desire and hunger within an athlete govern the ability to bounce back and fight on, and spur the willingness to learn. You can always compensate for lack of talent: you cannot compensate for lack of desire or dedication.

The key is to create 'the right motivational climate.' Too many people, Dick believes, think of motivation, not as climate, but as weather: you deal with rain or snow - specific situations - instead of creating the climate, the framework, within which your athlete can operate. As an example, Dick found when working with Gerhard Berger that his athlete hated running, and communicated his hatred only too clearly. Like all athletes, though, he needed a high level of endurance to compete successfully. Dick had to find an alternative.

Berger turned out to love playing squash, which became the hub of his endurance training - no more miles upon miles of road-running. It's a neat example of how effective two-way communication between coach and player achieves winning results. Since Berger enjoyed squash, why make training a hated burden when it didn't have to be? Too often, coaches and managers think pedantically and predictably. Rather than seeking solutions to a problem, they tend to bulldoze through with a lack of uncommunicative sensitivity that negates Dick's simple but eminently logical approach:

It centres round building on people's strengths, what they are good at - and 'everybody is good at something.' people enjoy what they are good at, and do it competently. That's the foundation for good coaching: build a positive profile made up of strengths, and never do the opposite - concentrate on what people do badly. This flatly contradicts the common outcome of performance reviews in large organisations, which love to provide development programmes to cover the incompetencies revealed by the appraisal.

'They never think of giving you a development programme for what you're good at.' Focusing on weaknesses gives the wrong message, providing negative motivation, while focusing on strengths is highly positive and recognises a basic truth: that people achieve in life through what they do well, not badly. Of course, weaknesses should be corrected, but not at the price of ignoring strengths. The mentor's role, using every means of communication in his or her power, is to create a positive, stimulating environment, where success is continually recognised and reinforced, and where weaknesses are quietly strengthened.