Management: Leading & Collaborating in a Competitive World (11th edition)

Book Preface

Our Goals

Our mission with this text hasn’t changed from that of our previous editions: to inform, instruct, and inspire. We hope to inform by providing descriptions of the important concepts and practices of modern management. We hope to instruct by describing how you can take action on the ideas discussed. We hope to inspire not only by writing in an interesting and optimistic way but also by providing a real sense of the opportunities ahead of you. Whether your goal is starting your own company, leading a team to greatness, building a strong organization, delighting your customers, or generally forging a positive future, we want to inspire you to take constructive actions.

We hope to inspire you to be both a thinker and a doer. We want you to think about the issues, think about the impact of your actions, think before you act. But being a good thinker is not enough; you also must be a doer. Management is a world of action. It is a world that requires timely and appropriate action. It is a world not for the passive but for those who commit to positive accomplishments.

Keep applying the ideas you learn in this course, read about management in sources outside of this course, and keep learning about management after you leave school and continue your career. Make no mistake about it: Learning about management is a personal voyage that will last years, an entire career.

Competitive Advantage

Today’s world is competitive. Never before has the world of work been so challenging. Never before has it been so imperative to your career that you learn the skills of management. Never before have people had so many opportunities and challenges with so many potential risks and rewards.

You will compete with other people for jobs, resources, and promotions. Your organization will compete with other firms for contracts, clients, and customers. To survive the competition, and to thrive, you must perform in ways that give you an edge over your competitors, that make the other party want to hire you, buy from you, and do repeat business with you. You will want them to choose you, not your competitor.

To survive and thrive, today’s managers have to think and act strategically. Today’s customers are well educated, aware of their options, and demanding of excellence. For this reason, managers today must think constantly about how to build a capable workforce and manage in a way that delivers the goods and services that provide the best possible value to the customer.

By this standard, managers and organizations must perform. Six essential types of performance, on which the organization beats, equals, or loses to the competition, are cost, quality, speed, innovation, service, and sustainability. These six performance dimensions, when managed well, deliver value to the customer and competitive advantage to you and your organization. We will elaborate on all of these topics throughout the book.

The idea is to keep you focused on a type of bottom line to make sure you think continually about delivering the goods that make both you and your organization a competitive success. This results-oriented approach is unique among management textbooks.