The Leader's Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done (Spiral-bound)

~ Peter Scholtes (Author) "On October 5, 1841, two Western Railroad passenger trains collided head-on somewhere between Worcester, Massachusetts and Albany, New York, killing a conductor and a passenger..." (more)
Key Phrases: false learning curve, uncluttered flow, key process indicators, New York, United States, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Lead your organization into the 21st century with the help of this groundbreaking book that is already creating a stir in corporate boardrooms across America! In a book that does for managers what his mega-bestseller, The Team Handbook, did for teams, Peter Scholtes, who is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential Quality leaders of the decade, shows the real root of management problems. Learn how to stop blaming your workers and start changing the systems with the help of activities and exercises that enable you to immediately begin implementing breakthrough improvements in all your work processes!

From the Back Cover

For Anyone Serious About Leading Their Organization Into the 21St Century

This groundbreaking book, already creating a stir, could only have been written by Peter R. Scholtes­­author of the best-selling book ever written on teams: The Team Handbook. In The Leader's Handbook, Scholtes, widely acknowledged as one of the most influential teachers of leadership and management of the decade, does for managers what The Team Handbook did for teams. Scholtes shows how bad systems, not bad workers, cause the vast majority of management problems. He takes controversial stands against performance appraisals and incentive compensation. And he takes you from theory to practice with a wide variety of state-of-the-art activities and exercises to help you immediately begin implementing breakthrough improvements in all your work processes.

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Product Details

• Spiral-bound: 415 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (December 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070580286
• ISBN-13: 978-0070580282
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #26,470 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A model for the leaders of the future., October 22, 1999

By A Customer

I knew that the organization I work for was stuck in the stone-age (Dismal Leaders). Then Something amazing happened. Upper management decided we needed a change. Due to my backround in Teambuilding, I was asked to Champion the change for the future. I decided to utilize most of the things I learned from reading this insightful book. The results to this point have been outstanding. People are beginning to come out of their shells and be creative again. Barriers are slowly coming down throughout the organization. Real Work is getting done through cross-funtional teams of people who care about customer satisfaction. We have a long way to go, but as long as management sticks to their word, change will happen. This book is a useful tool for that transformation.Everyone who is in a management position should read this book and learn what it's like to truely lead your fellow workers. I also recommend the Team Handbook.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical, incisive and visionary handbook, September 13, 2001

By	George Zee (www.frzee.org, Hong Kong) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Scholtes expects to shock people right from the first page of his Preface. Let me quote extensively:
"More than 95 percent of your organization's problems derive from your systems, processes, and methods, not from your individual workers....

We look to the heroic efforts of outstanding individuals for our successful work. Instead we must create systems that routinely allow excellent work to result from the ordinary efforts of ordinary people.

Changing the system will change what people do. Changing what people do will not change the system.

Certain common management approaches--management by objectives, performance appraisal, merit pay, pay for performance, and ISO 9000--represent not leadership but the abdication of leadership.

Current buzzwords like empowerment, accountability, and high performance are meaningless, empty babble..." (ix-x)

The old organizations's leaders need: forcefulness, ability to motivate and inspire, decisiveness, willfulness, assertiveness, result- and bottom-line orientation, being task-oriented and having integrity and diplomacy.

Scholtes' new leadership competencies (much influenced by Edward Deming's ideas...) are based on a new mentality and understanding of: systems thinking, variability of work, how we learn, psychology and human behavior, interactions of these components, and vision, meaning, direction and focus.

The bulk of the book gives clear elaborations of these new competencies, with charts, illustrations, pertinent questions and many tools. Ch. 4 on "Getting the Daily Work Done" is a tough one, partly because it takes much effort to grasp the author's use of a Japanese term, "Gemba" (even when I can read the original Chinese characters). Issues of waste, standardization, change versus improvement, performance without appraisal, use of measurement data... are all seen in the new light of systems thinking.

Carefully study the differences between "Crazymakers" and "Healing and Learning" in the workplace (pp378-387). There is a summary of the book under "The 47 Habits of Pretty Good Leaders" (pp391-6). Peter Senge's books give excellent background material. This one is a real handbook that should be methodically studied, discussed, adapted and applied to one's own institutions. One must not forget the advice given in Chapter 1: "leaders must be patient with themselves and others, persistent, and humble, and allow themselves and others to be inelegant." (p12,p391)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Book on Process & Quality Improvement, July 8, 2006

By	Kevin Mackie (Livermore, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a very good book that I would recommend to any manager. I also think many employees would learn a lot from reading this book as well. So why just three stars?

The main reason is because the book talks very little in the way of leadership or inspiring your people. This is a book primarily focused on process and quality improvement, but learning about leadership and inspiring my employees is the reason I bought this book. To me, the difference between a manager and a leader is that the successful manager gets his people to do what needs to be done. A successful leader gets his people to *want* to do what needs to be done. There was a lot more information on that topics in The Team Handbook, which Scholtes co-wrote.

The truth is that I think this is a very good book, and I'd gladly give it four stars if the title was more descriptive of the book's content. What I like most about this book is the way Scholter walks the reader through the thought process of analyzing an existing process and finding ways to improve it. He bases many of his principles from Deming's work on quality improvement and, not surprisingly, many of his examples are from Japanese companies. Many of his ideas transfer easily to the American workforce, but I'm not convinced that all of them would be so effective outside of Japan, due to the cultural differences between the two workforces.

Amazon has enabled Search Inside This Book, so I would encourage anybody thinking about purchasing this book to take a peek and see the topics that Scholter covers. Flip through the Surprise Me feature and you'll likely see some of the many charts and diagrams that Scholter uses to great effect to show the reader a process, or give them a tool to analyze their own processes.

The only area that didn't sit well with me is Chapter 9, Performance without Appraisal. In this chapter it appears as though Scholtes' premise is that workers belong to McGregor's Theory X camp. While some are, the overly simplistic approach that assumes all are makes this chapter very frustrating to read. He spends a lot of time highlighting the fault of performance management, but he provides very little insight how to do it another way.

The net is that this is a very informative book presented in a very clear manner that can provide benefit for almost every manager. The title is a little misleading, so make sure you flip through the book before buying it.