It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy

It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy Review

It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy Feature

• ISBN13: 9780446529112
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It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy Overview

The story of Captain D. Michael Abrashoff and his command of USS Benfold has become legendary inside and outside the Navy. Now Abrashoff offers this fascinating tale of top-down change for anyone trying to navigate today's uncertain business seas. When Captain Abrashoff took over as commander of USS Benfold, a ship armed with every cutting-edge system available, it was like a business that had all the latest technology but only some of the productivity. Knowing that responsibility for improving performance rested with him, he realized he had to improve his own leadership skills before he could improve his ship. Within months he created a crew of confident and inspired problem-solvers eager to take the initiative and take responsibility for their actions. The slogan on board became "It's your ship," and Benfold was soon recognized far and wide as a model of naval efficiency. How did Abrashoff do it? Against the backdrop of today's United States Navy-Benfold was a key player in our Persian Gulf fleet-Abrashoff shares his secrets of successful management including: * See the ship through the eyes of the crew: By soliciting a sailor's suggestions, Abrashoff drastically reduced tedious chores that provided little additional value. * Communicate, communicate, communicate: The more Abrashoff communicated the plan, the better the crew's performance. His crew would eventually call him "Megaphone Mike," since they heard from him so often. * Create discipline by focusing on purpose: Discipline skyrocketed when Abrashoff's crew believed that what they were doing was important. * Listen aggressively: After learning that many sailors wanted to use the GI Bill, Abrashoff brought a test official aboard the ship-and held the SATs forty miles off the Iraqi coast. From achieving amazing cost savings to winning the highest gunnery score in the Pacific Fleet, Captain Abrashoff's extraordinary campaign sent shock waves through the U.S. Navy. It can help you change the course of your ship, no matter where your business battles are fought.

It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy Specifications

Other than the sobering fact that real lives are regularly at stake, running a navy ship is a lot like running a business: leaders of both must get the most out of their crews to operate at peak efficiency and complete the tasks at hand. As commander of the highly acclaimed USS Benfold, Captain D. Michael Abrashoff irrefutably demonstrated how progressive management can succeed at sea; in It's Your Ship, he translates his methods into an approach that can also be applied by land-bound captains of commerce and industry. Describing "the ideas and techniques that I used to win my sailors' trust and, eventually, their enthusiastic commitment to our joint goal of making our ship the best in the fleet," Abrashoff cites embarrassing failures along with subsequent triumphs to illuminate the keys to his accomplished 20-month tenure aboard the guided missile destroyer. His suggestions: lead by example; listen aggressively; communicate purpose and meaning; create a climate of trust; look for results, not salutes; take calculated risks; go beyond standard procedure; build up your people; generate unity; and improve your people's quality of life. While hardly original on the surface, Abrashoff's course should provide practical direction and inspiration for any leader hoping for similarly positive results in similarly rigid organizations. --Howard Rothman

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The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials)

The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials) Review

Too often people ask "what's new" rather than "what's working." That's why so many organizations have 'fad-surfed' from one popular wave to another while wasting time and money. And in the process, they have "Dilbertized" their workplaces with a "high snicker factor" of cynicism and resistance to management's next change program. Research continues to show that one half to two-thirds of initiatives like e-whatever (commerce, government, business, etc.), technologies like CRM or ERP, service improvement, Six Sigma, supply-chain management and such, are failing or have seriously missed their original targets.

That's why I continue to write and speak about "timeless leadership principles" such as in The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success. We can repackage and rename leadership or management programs and initiatives. But inevitably we rediscover underlying themes and approaches that are the enduring keys to success. That's also a big reason I have been a Peter Drucker fan since I first began my management and training career in the mid-seventies. For over 65 years (!), Peter Drucker cut through the rhetoric and complex formulas to define the core essence of successful management and leadership. The Essential Drucker is a selection of twenty-six of his writings on management/leadership, personal effectiveness, and society. While I think the editors missed a few essential pieces of his, most of the ones they selected represent his timeless wisdom.

Here are a few passages that highlight critical truths we need to constantly work at applying to leading ourselves and others:

Success always makes obsolete the very behavior that achieved it. It always creates new realities. It always creates, above all, its own and different problems. Only the fairy tale ends, "they lived happily ever after."

All businesses have access to pretty much the same resources. Except for the rare monopoly situation, the only thing that differentiates one business from another in any given field is the quality of its management on all levels.

One does not "manage people." The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.

The starting point has to be what customers consider value.

In an organization that manages by drives (programs), people either neglect their job to get on with the current drive, or silently organize for collective sabotage of the drive to get their work done.

Making the right people decisions is the ultimate means of controlling an organization well.

A well managed organization is a "dull" organization. The "dramatic" things in such an organization are basic decisions that make the future, rather than heroics in mopping up yesterday's mistakes.

The final requirement of effective leadership is to earn trust.

The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials) Feature

• The Essential Drucker
• English
• First Edition
• Paperback
• gelatine plate paper

The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials) Overview

Father of modern management, social commentator, and preeminent business philosopher, Peter F. Drucker analyzed economics and society for more than sixty years. Now for readers everywhere who are concerned with the ways that management practices and principles affect the performance of organizations, individuals, and society, there is The Essential Drucker—an invaluable compilation of essential materials from the works of a management legend.

Containing twenty-six core selections, The Essential Drucker covers the basic principles and concerns of management and its problems, challenges, and opportunities, giving managers, executives, and professionals the tools to perform the tasks that the economy and society of tomorrow will demand of them.

The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials) Specifications

Ever since his first book was published some six decades ago, Peter Drucker has been essential to everyone serious about the "management of an enterprise (and) the self-management of the individual, whether executive or professional, within an enterprise and altogether in our society of managed organizations." This distinguished 30-year Claremont University professor has continuously identified critical principles in management, economics, politics, and the world in general. And he has redirected our thinking about them through more than two dozen books, including an autobiography and a couple of works of fiction. Now, with The Essential Drucker, he has overseen the compilation of his most important fundamentals into one indispensable book.

Reaching back as far as 1954 with his treatise "Management by Objectives and Self-Control" ("Each manager, from the 'big boss' down to the production foreman or the chief clerk, needs clearly spelled-out objectives" that clarify expected contributions "to the attainment of company goals in all areas of the business"), Drucker's now-established ideas take on a surprising new relevancy when remixed equally pioneering ideas from the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. Between the thoughtful "Management as Social and Liberal Art" through the provocative "From Analysis to Perception--The New Worldview" (both originally published in 1988's The New Realities), this book revisits some of modern management's most inspired writing and presents it in a way that should appeal to both newcomers and those needing a refresher course on Drucker's basic beliefs. --Howard Rothman

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