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41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent insights - backed by empirical evidence., January 3, 2007
This review is from: 12: The Elements of Great Managing (Hardcover)
The 12 elements represent the aspects of work that are most powerful in explaining workers' productive motivations on the job. They include job clarity, materials and equipment, recognition and praise... learning and growth opportunities.
These are my reasons for rating this book 5 stars:
1. The insights are backed by empirical evidence,
2. Although the approach is scientific, the book is easy to understand,
3. It incorporates international perspectives.
The authors illustrate the 12 Elements with examples from the US, Brazil, Germany, India and other countries. The insights are practical and backed by empirical evidence gathered from 10 million employee and manager interviews from 114 countries. In this book employee engagement has been linked to business performance. The authors have compared the top-quartile and bottom-quartile business units for the Elements, and have measured the overall difference between engaged and actively disengaged employees. Throughout the book you will read results that link these differences to a variety of business metrics - productivity, profitability, absenteeism, turnover, shrink (the retailers' euphemism for theft), accidents, customer ratings, etc. I enjoyed the way in which the findings were presented. Each chapter starts with a situation where a company has problems related to an Element. The authors then present their research and findings. After that a "great" manager implements changes and saves the day.
This book is exceptionally well researched. In addition to research by Gallup, it includes references from the works of several other researchers and authors that stretch across time and disciplines; for example Economics (from Adam Smith to Steven Levitt), Psychology (from Abraham Maslow to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), Management (from Frederick Taylor to Jeffrey Pfeffer)... Movies (Office Space), TV (Seinfeld) and Cartoons (Dilbert). The book also includes discoveries from neuroscience and game theory.
A note on the important of empirical evidence:
Many managers prefer to manage by their gut feelings, intuition, or by whatever fad that consulting firms are selling. For them, "evidence" often means personal, N=1 experience, and not consistent demonstration of results across contexts and time. That's part of the reason that they will continue to create the same problems that so many before them have made. Today, movements such as "evidence based management" are gaining popularity in academic and business circles. Several HR and Organizational Behavior professionals and professors (for instance Stanford's Pfeffer and Sutton) are applying techniques from science, engineering and statistics to the discipline of management.
Overall, I found this to be an excellent book and recommend it to all managers. Should you be interested, please feel free to read my guides and other reviews of management books.
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Overdue Update on First, Break All the Rules with Detailed Examples, March 26, 2007
This review is from: 12: The Elements of Great Managing (Hardcover)
If you haven't read First, Break All the Rules, I have good news for you: Just read this book instead. 12: The Elements of Great Managing is a better book.
If you have read First, Break All the Rules, chances are it was a long time ago. You are probably ready for a refresher if you read that book back in 1999 or 2000 as I did.
As before, the Gallup people have asked that reviewers not list the 12 elements. I think they are overly sensitive, but I'll honor their request.
Let me characterize the 12 elements instead: Each point relates to either a necessity for being able to do your job well, having a sense that people care that you come to work, feeling engaged by your work, and seeing a future in what you are doing. Employees who feel engaged in these dimensions usually stay longer, are less likely to be out sick, and perform at higher levels of productivity. After you see the list, you'll accept those conclusions, I'm sure.
Since the first book came out, Gallup has done a lot more interviews. One of the benefits of all hose millions of additional interviews is to provide extra information about how and why each element is important. I was pleased to see that the authors also draw on psychological and physiological research to help explain their findings.
But the best parts, for me, were the 12 case studies that were like mini-fables of the sort that Ken Blanchard likes to write . . . except these cases involve real people. The leaders make mistakes as well as do things right, and you get a sense of how hard it is to improve performance in an important employee dimension when your organization has been doing it badly for some time. One of the things I liked best about the cases was that the authors didn't go overboard by just presenting organizations that perform in the top 1 percent that wouldn't seem quite real to most people.
I also liked the section at the end about how pay overlaps with all of the other findings. Most people are affected by their pay, and I thought that the authors put that into perspective quite well.
Although part of the message is that you need Gallup surveys to figure out what your problem is with employee engagement, the book is tactfully quiet on that point. Nice!
Although you may be tempted to either just read the list and feel like you've got it or just read the cases in areas where you think you have problems, I encourage you to read all of the material. You might get a new assignment tomorrow that will look totally different from where you are today. That happened to several people in the book. You'll be better prepared when that happens.
I thought that First, Break All the Rules was better than an MBA education on how to be an effective leader. This book is probably better than most DBA educations on the same subject.
Be engaging!
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Material, but Redundant, October 31, 2007
This review is from: 12: The Elements of Great Managing (Hardcover)
Overall this is a great book. It's packed with good information, backed with solid research, great statistics, real examples and well written. Normally I'd give it a 5 star rating. When compared against other books in its genre, it's a great book and deserves your attention.
However, I found much of this book a rehash of the material in "First, Break All the Rules". The ideas are important enough that I went ahead and forced my way through the book. However I was definitely disappointed that the "Long-Awaited Follow-Up" as the cover advertises didn't really contain anything dramatically new that was not already covered in "First, Break All the Rules".
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