Customer Reviews

Managing Multiple Bosses: How to Juggle Priorities, Personalities & Projects -- and Make It Look Easy

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Nickerson's Managing Multiple Bosses is chock-full of practical advice - a great instructional and reference tool. It's not a text book, but it could be. If you follow its case-by-case format Nickerson offers brief, yet thorough, and readable situation analyses. The process is: 1) a problem description; 2) initial reactions/responses are given (first pass); 3) the readers are given a few lines to write their thoughts; 4) second thoughts from a group discussion are itemized (second pass); and then 5) finally consensus recommendations are given. This is a complete, fully-examined instructive process. Nickerson uses real-life contemporary workplace issues: "my boss challenges me by throwing me to the wolves" and "one of my bosses is uncommunicative, I can't read him" and "my boss has unreasonable demands that causes chaos and goes unnoticed by top management." Nickerson challenges readers to prevent getting dumped on by implementing proactive techniques: get smart, negotiate workloads, show you workloads visibly using charts and graphics. Show how much work is in the hopper and what is at "at risk". Risk management warns those owners to participate in accomplishing the work to every one's satisfaction. In effect, "I won't hang your work out to dry if you agree not to set me up to fail" - a mutually agreeable working circumstance. Managing Multiple Bosses clearly shows how to manage priorities according to risks to the organization as a whole. This smart approach benefits everyone - and it sure beats crisis management!

Managing Multiple Bosses: How to Juggle Priorities, Personalities & Projects, and Make It Look Easy is a book with an atypical approach to solving common workplace issues. Written by author and speaker Pat Nickerson, the book is in fact a compilation of issues, discussions and solutions offered at different seminars by disparate participants. In this way, the book takes advantage of a rare common wisdom and set of experiences. Moreover, The overall subject-matter is more true to the book's sub-title as opposed to its main title. Managing Multiple Bosses... has a broader focus than just managing multiple superiors. It indeed discusses and offers practical solutions for other aspects of the corporate circus. In this context, the book has a lot to offer and is even fun to read at times - the serious nature of the issues discussed aside.
The sole fault with the book though is its organization. Titles, sections and problems/solutions do not enjoy an elegant and logical pattern or organization. Rather, the book is somehow organized as one discussion after the other and the bold headings are of little consequence.
All in all, Pat Nickerson's compilation is an above average read for corporate citizens.