Management Guides and Systems - The Conspiracy

The bookshelves are full of books promising to make me a better manager, a more organised manager, a more effective manager, person and/or partner.  My inbox is often peppered with invites to seminars and workshops on how to lead, coach, inspire or other ways of influencing people to listen to me during business hours.

These two phenomenon are linked.  I think management guides and systems were cooked up by the publishing industry and the hoteliers to make money out of us keen to learn managers.  On the one hand the publishers get a constant stream of money from stressed out managers wanting a way to make the work problems disappear and when the books don't work the hotelier can squeeze us into windowless conference rooms and feed us tepid coffee and danish pastries whilst we get taught how to become a better, more effective, efficient, balanced, focussed principle driven manager/leader/coach.

Because if there was one way to become the best manager you possibly could be, there would be one book and one course and we would all get our companies to pay for it and bingo! we are all the best possible managers we could ever hope to be.

Except for life isn't like that.

It is obviously not that straightforward if you can fill shelves upon shelves in bookshops with "how to guides" and pearls of wisdom from business icons vying for space on said shelves.  And then there are the apps - countless dozens of them, all offering similar, but different takes on how to organise that pesky to do list or all those projects you have on the go.

So perhaps there isn't one system that can solve all your management ills in one go.  Perhaps all those books are wrong and you don't need to spend another afternoon in Basingstoke watching a Powerpoint presentation on the 5 (or is it 6?) key leadership skills every manager needs.  Perhaps you just need to find a way to adhere to some straightforward principles and check how many you adhere to each day or week?

Then you can borrow what you want from any of the systems on offer without having to subscribe to the Facebook group or write comments on blogs about management.