21 Ideas for Managers By Charles Handy Jossey-Bass, 200 pages, $37.50 Why The Best Man For The Job Is A Woman By Esther Wachs Book Harper Business, 268 pages $36.50 REVIEWED BY
Intelligence lies within each of us. But the type of intelligence varies from person to person. Similarly, in each of us lurks a parent, a child and an adult. Which role we adopt varies from time to time.
Understanding the differences within us and within others is at the core of Charles Handy's latest book, 21 Ideas For Managers: Practical Wisdom for Managing Your Company and Yourself.
"Awareness is all," stresses the former executive and London School of Business professor, who calls himself a social philosopher.
"Awareness makes one more tolerant, awareness helps one to avoid some bad scenes, awareness can help one bring out the best in other people."
As usual, Mr. Handy roams in this latest book of essays, tackling how managers can organize work by probing into psychology, sociology and anthropology, and weaving in lots of striking, personal anecdotes. Some of it is familiar from his previous books, but all of it is entrancing, written clearly and in his gentle and illuminating style.
He begins by reminding us that intelligence has many faces:
Logical: Those who can reason, analyze and memorize.
Spatial: Those who can discern patterns in things and create them.
Musical: Those who can sing, play or make music.
Practical: Those who can take apart a carburetor but may not be able to spell it or explain how they did it.
Physical: Those who can get the most from their bodies.
Intrapersonal: Those who can see into themselves.
Interpersonal: Those who can make things happen with and through people.
He says that it is the tragedy of much of our schooling that we are led to think that logical intelligence is the only type that matters. Today, we need to be sensitive to those differences in abilities and not view them as difficulties to overcome.
"Getting organized used to mean getting rid of differences: nowadays it means using them," he says.
Getting organized also means discovering the "e-factor" within others -- the private list of things people want from life -- that will trigger energy, excitement, enthusiasm and effervescence. He says that money, which is often assumed to be the prime e-factor, is not really a motive for energetic action itself, but a clue to other motives.
"Everyone has a shopping list of what they want from work and life, even if they have not written it down. The more organizations can match these shopping lists, the more they can expect from people. . . . Listen to what people really want and give it to them," he urges.
Most management books still use men almost exclusively in their examples, but in Why The Best Man For The Job Is A Woman, Esther Wachs Book focuses solely on female leaders for an engaging look at managerial success. They include Orit Gadesh, who chairs consulting firm Bain & Co.; Ann Winblad, a partner in the venture capital firm Humber Winblad; Meg Whitman, chief executive officer of eBay; and Rebecca Mark, who shot up the ranks of Enron Corp. and until recently ran its water unit.
The book is subtitled The Unique Female Qualities of Leadership, but the author wavers on whether the formula for success she delineates is primarily female, calling it a new paradigm for leadership.
That new paradigm isn't novel or rousing. Managers, she says, must sell a vision; be willing to reinvent the rules; have a laser focus to achieve; maximize high touch in an era of high tech; turn challenges into opportunities; be obsessed with customer preferences; and show courage under fire.
What makes that come alive are the profiles she chooses -- and delivers with flair.
Harvey Schachter is a freelance writer based in Kingston. He can be reached by e-mail at his@kos.net
Harvey Schachter