I'm Sorry I Broke Your Company

Zusatztext Finally! an author challenging our broken management models who has credibilityshe has been there. Karen Phelan not only explains why the emperorour sacred ways of managinghas no clothes but provides us with insightful alternatives that promise to add real value to our organizations and the people that make them function. Dean Schroeder! award-winning coauthor of Ideas Are Free Funny! irreverent! and outrageous! this book is making a deeply serious point: talking to actual people and figuring out how to help them work together better is what's going to make organizations stronger! not another PowerPoint presentation. Rosina L. Racioppi! President and CEO! Women Unlimited! Inc. Informationen zum Autor Karen Phelan is a cofounder of Operating Principals, a consulting firm that replaces bad business practices with ones that work. A former engineer with degrees from MIT, she spent more than a dozen years as a consultant with Deloitte & Touche and Gemini Consulting and afterward worked in management at Fortune 100 companies. Klappentext Karen Phelan is really sorry - no, she really is. She had the best of intentions and training in business systems, performance management and all the latest theories and best practices. At companies like Deloitte, Pfizer, J&J and countless consulting clients, she did her best do business by the numbers--the only problem is that businesses are run by people, not mathematical formulas. She and other consultants may have "broken" your company, but she's eager to repair the damage and make amends. Luckily, with decades of experience and pure common sense, her book is the perfect antidote to years of management malpractice. Phelan focuses on how management gurus have fouled up the "people side" of companies - balanced scorecards, key performance indicators, process reengineering and dozens of other management fads are reduced to so much snake oil and bunkum under her withering gaze. With a mix of cleared-eyed business analysis, "in the trenches" stories, and hard-won lessons, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore. Phelan covers the gamut of strategy development, HR, metrics, leadership competencies, and just plain managing people. She explains in gory detail why outside consultants are almost always the last people you should ask to improve your business. She also explains why the most important ingredient in business management is often in the shortest supply: empathy. In the tradition of classics like Up the Organization and Managers, Not MBA's , Phelan provides a breath of fresh air. In parting, however, Phelan allows that consultants (like her!) do sometimes have their place - she provides a much-needed playbook that lays out the proper vocation of consulting and tools for managers to proceed with caution.Introduction Most people, if not all, have a hidden talentsome goofy or useful ability that they share with few other humans. I once met a woman with an uncanny ability to call coin tosses. I know another woman who can mimic the tones of a telephone and get her voice mail without pressing buttons. My older son can manipulate three-dimensional images of objects in his mind. When we built models together, I noticed that he built his in his head first. My younger son converses in his sleep. I don't mean he utters random words or phrases. You can have an entire conversation with him while he is sleeping. My husband can dead reckon anywhere through the woods. If you ever need to get out of the woods quickly, he can navigate a path without a GPS and get you within one hundred feet of your car. I have a skill, too. I realized exactly what it was only a few years ago. In 2006 I attended a Sloan School class on systems dynamics. Our first task was to break into teams and play the beer distribution game, a simulation of the supply chain of a beer manufacturer. The gam...

Auteur

Karen Phelan is a cofounder of Operating Principals, a consulting firm that replaces bad business practices with ones that work. A former engineer with degrees from MIT, she spent more than a dozen years as a consultant with Deloitte & Touche and Gemini Consulting and afterward worked in management at Fortune 100 companies.

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Karen Phelan is really sorry - no, she really is. She had the best of intentions and training in business systems, performance management and all the latest theories and best practices. At companies like Deloitte, Pfizer, J&J and countless consulting clients, she did her best do business by the numbers--the only problem is that businesses are run by people, not mathematical formulas. She and other consultants may have "broken" your company, but she's eager to repair the damage and make amends. Luckily, with decades of experience and pure common sense, her book is the perfect antidote to years of management malpractice.Phelan focuses on how management gurus have fouled up the "people side" of companies - balanced scorecards, key performance indicators, process reengineering and dozens of other management fads are reduced to so much snake oil and bunkum under her withering gaze. With a mix of cleared-eyed business analysis, "in the trenches" stories, and hard-won lessons, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore.Phelan covers the gamut of strategy development, HR, metrics, leadership competencies, and just plain managing people. She explains in gory detail why outside consultants are almost always the last people you should ask to improve your business. She also explains why the most important ingredient in business management is often in the shortest supply: empathy. In the tradition of classics like Up the Organization and Managers, Not MBA's, Phelan provides a breath of fresh air.In parting, however, Phelan allows that consultants (like her!) do sometimes have their place - she provides a much-needed playbook that lays out the proper vocation of consulting and tools for managers to proceed with caution.

Résumé
Karen Phelan is sorry. She really is. She tried to do business by the numbers—the management consultant way—developing measures, optimizing processes, and quantifying performance. The only problem is that businesses are run by people. And people can’t be plugged into formulas or summed up in scorecards.

Phelan dissects a whole range of consulting treatments for unhealthy companies and shows why they’re essentially fad diets: superficial would-be fixes that don’t result in lasting improvements and can cause serious damage. With a mix of clear-eyed business analysis, heart-wrenching stories, and hard-won lessons for both consultants and the people who hire them, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore. Karen Phelan and other consultants may have “broken” your company, but she’s eager to make amends.

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Introduction

Most people, if not all, have a hidden talent—some goofy or useful ability that they share with few other humans. I once met a woman with an uncanny ability to call coin tosses. I know another woman who can mimic the tones of a telephone and get her voice mail without pressing buttons. My older son can manipulate three-dimensional images of objects in his mind. When we built models together, I noticed that he built his in his head first. My younger son converses in his sleep. I don’t mean he utters random words or phrases. You can have an entire conversation with him while he is sleeping. My husband can dead reckon anywhere through the woods. If you ever need to get out of the woods quickly, he can navigate a path without a GPS and get you within one hundred feet of your car. I have a skill, too. I realized exactly what it was only a few years ago.

In 2006 I attended a Sloan School class on systems dynamics. Our first task was to break into teams and play the beer distribution game, a…