On my way to a week long training conference nearly a month ago I read two books with the word “manager” in the title. With my usual style of choosing books by their cover, I bought these two to read on my way. I know I am a better manager for going to the conference, but these two books might help me even more.
The first was The One Minute Manager (one must imagine a digital clock displaying “:01″ within the “O” of “One”), by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. The whole point of the book is that a managers duties revolve around many one minute interactions with employees. These activities are One Minute Goals, One Minute Praisings, and One Minute Reprimands. I’m certain I would benefit from implementing these things. But that is not what most interested me about this book.
The second was The Dream Manager, by Matthew Kelly, which I thought would tell me how to be the sort of manager people only dream about having. Nope. It was about Managing peoples dreams by helping them achieve them. The premise is that employees need decent pay, but once it is decent they are motivated very little by increases in pay. The point of the book is to find what people really want in this life and, as their employer, help them get it. I am not sure how I can implement this in my management role, but it gives me something to think about when interacting with the people who work for me. But that is not what most interested me about this book.
Both books, and this is what was most interesting indeed, use a narrative format to communicate what is most often communicated in bullet-point business-presentation-style non-fiction. In fact I am reading a third book right now which reads more like a text book than a story. Knowing only a few speculative hints of what it means to be post-modern, I find it fascinating that our information driven business world has taken to narration to draw readers in as participants to experience these specific management tools and styles, rather than using logical proofs about how these things work and are important. I must say it does make for more lively reading. I read both of them in a single day, but I am still reading that third book.
This writing style, narrative non-fiction non-biographical, has not been perfected yet. The characters still have long dialog which could have been cut-and-pasted from a management manual. See Young’s The Shack, it attempts to communicate theology in a narrative rather than systematic way, but it contains long bits of dialog which belong in a 1000 page systematic theology text book.
I is my hope this style develops and characters in them become free not to preach at the reader.
