HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People (with featured article "Leadership That Gets Results," by Daniel Goleman) [Versión Kindle]

If you are looking for a quick introduction to the ideas of a number of thought-leaders on how to manage people, this book is a good resource. The ideas discussed in this book include:

Daniel Goleman: There are six leadership styles - coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coaching. The most effective leaders are able to change between these styles when appropriate.

Frederick Herzberg: Punishments and rewards are ineffective tools for motivating people. Instead, try enriching their jobs by removing controls, giving employees more information, and giving access to greater challenges.

Manzoni and Barsoux: Employees who are viewed as weak performers often live down to expectations because the supervisor's attempts at performance management result in worse rather than better performance.

Carol Walker: New managers often perform poorly because they have not learnt the skills of delegating, getting support from above, projecting confidence, focusing on the big picture, and giving constructive feedback.

Marcus Buckingham: Great managers do not try to change their employees. Instead, they tweak roles to capitalize on individual strengths, create personalised incentives, and tailor coaching to unique learning styles.

Kim and Mauborgne: Harmony in the workplace required fair process, including inviting input from employees affected by a decision, explaining the thinking behind decisions, and providing clear expectations.

Chris Argyris: An organization's smartest and most successful people are often poor learners because they have not had the opportunity for introspection that comes with failure.

Banaji, Bazerman and Chugh: Everyone has unconscious biases which affect decisions. To counteract these biases, gather better data, get rid of stereotypical cues, and broaden your mind-set.

Katzenbach and Smith: A good team has a meaningful common purpose, specific performance goals, a mix of complementary skills, a strong commitment to how the work gets done, and mutual accountability.

Gabarro and Kotter: To have a good relationship with your boss, focus on compatible work styles, mutual expectations, information flow, dependability and honesty, and good use of time and resources.

In my opinion, every article in the book contains ideas which will be useful in almost any workplace. In most workplaces there is enormous scope for improving the quality of people management. Some of the articles were first published more than 20 years ago, but the principles which they espouse are yet to find their way into most workplaces. I highly recommend this book to any manager.

This is a great collection of useful and insightful articles. That said, shame on HBR and Amazon for not paying more attention to the formatting. There is no table of contents, so you cannot see up front what the articles are or navigate easily through them. Furthermore, some of the tables and other inset material is not formatted for the Kindle so it break awkwardly across screens and is hard to bookmark. I expected more from the e-book version. I might just as well have saved myself the money and hunted down the individual articles in PDF format through my employer's library!

This volume is one of several in a new series of anthologies of articles that initially appeared in the Harvard Business Review, in this instance from 1980 until 2005. Remarkably, none seems dated; on the contrary, if anything, all seem more relevant now than ever before as their authors discuss what are (literally) essential dimensions of managing one's self as well as others.

More specifically, how to get results, motivate employees, avoid or overcome the "Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome," save rookie managers from themselves, understand what great managers do, use fair process to manage in the knowledge economy, teach smart people how to learn, determine how ethical (or unethical) someone is, understand what "the discipline of a team" is and does, and finally, how to manage one's boss (i.e. lead up).

Each article includes two invaluable reader-friendly devices, "Idea in Brief" and "Idea in Practice" sections, that facilitate, indeed expedite review of key points. Some articles also include mini-essays on even more specific subjects such as "Growing Your Emotional Intelligence" (Daniel Goleman), "The Elusive One Thing" (Marcus Buckingham), "Making Sense of Irrational Behavior at VW and Siemans-Nixdorf" and "Fair Process Is Critical in Knowledge Work" (W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne), "Are You Biased?" (Mahzarin R. Banaji, Max H. Bazerman, and Dolly Chugh), and "Building Team Performance" (Jon Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith).

These ten articles do not - because they obviously cannot - explain everything that one knows to know and understand about managing one's self as well as others effectively. However, I do not know of another single source at this price (currently $14.13 from Amazon) that provides more and better information, insights, and advice that will help leaders to achieve success in the business dimensions examined in this volume.