Managing the Gray Areas: Essential Insights for Leading People, Projects & Organizations

Managing the Gray Areas: Essential Insights for Leading People, Projects & Organizations | Jerry Manas | Refreshing View of Complex Management Problems

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Managing the Gray ...

	Managing the Gray Areas: Essential Insights for Leading People, Projects & Organizations Jerry Manas RMC Publications, Inc., 2008 - 232 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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This groundbreaking book by best-selling author Jerry Manas touches on topics such as principles, values, ethics, decision-making, incentives, staffing, critical thinking, and communication, pulling ideas from a wide variety of knowledge areas. Managing the Gray Areas explores typical challenges that many leaders of people, projects and organizations struggle with, and offers a set of guidelines, principles, and tools that can help navigate these murky waters. Challenges and issues covered in this groundbreaking new book include:

- Ensuring accountability without micromanagement
- Implementing the right level of internal processes
- Creating positive images for organizations, teams and products
- Balancing individual needs with organizational goals
- Communicating with simplicity and context
- Assembling teams and team makeup
- Creating flexible, yet integrated organizations
- And more!

How we address these difficult choices will determine the feel of our organization as a whole as well as how people interact, how work gets done, and ultimately the strategies of both our present and our future. If you believe that true leadership is about understanding and managing complexities instead of taking black and white approaches to problems, you need this book!

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Timely, Refreshing, & A Necessary Read

Jerry Manas provides an excellent set of compelling reasons to reflect on how the world is certainly much more gray than black and white and how employees are human beings needing to be treated as the most valuable part of any organization.

Far too often managers (admittedly myself included at times) tend to think about how to establish rigid policies and procedures rather than considering more guiding principles. Many of the concepts Manas suggests I have tried to implement or discuss with others in the past but I have found it to be difficult. Manas gives suggestions on why people think in black and white and how one can approach situations differently.

Looking at the table of contents you will see he has picked out some great gray topics; Vigilance versus Delegation, Structure versus Flexibility, Centralization versus Decentralization, etc.

This is one of those books you might find yourself lending or giving to a manager/leader pleading them to read. If they pick up just a few of the concepts it will be well worth it.

I also like the references and uses of other books helping to support his concepts. The book format works well too with the Concept/text, then "Key Concepts" and "Questions to Ponder" and then a place for notes. This helps to reinforce the text and makes it easy for a discussion group reading of the book or for just a quick reference in the future.

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Refreshing View of Complex Management Problems

Managing the Gray Areas: Essential Insights for Leading People, Projects & Organizations
Too many management books are so full of jargon and business-speak that I need a dictionary to get through them. This book by Jery Manas is a readable, friendly, discussion of several problems managers face when trying to successfully lead their organizations in today's business environment. The main argument set forth by the author is that both sides of any argument have merit, and we must, as managers, integrate all viewpoints into a workable solution using creativity and an open mind.
The structure of this book is similar to a workbook, in that there is an opening question at the beginning of each chapter, followed by a list of key points and questions for review at the end. The final section of the book synthesizes the seven gray areas discussed and shares tools to manage these gray areas.
If you are a busy manager, and need a good book to work through in small chunks, this is a great book to read, and should be added to your professional library.

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