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Recommended Resources – AMA Business Boot Camp

AMA Business Boot Camp book reviewAMA Business Boot Camp: Management and Leadership Fundamentals That Will See You Successfully Through Your Career
edited by Edward T. Reilly

About the Book

AMA Business Boot Camp edited by American Management Association (AMA) International CEO Edward T. Reilly is a reader’s digest of fundamental management and leadership skills. Within this book, Edward compiles leading practices garnered from AMA’s ninety years of research and observation of the world’s top performing managers. This book contains essential insights for newly promoted and aspiring managers to:

  • Define their role as a manager; creating a healthy and productive workplace environment
  • Identify employee motivators; delegating for development and coaching for superior performance
  • Adapt to a changing organization; recruiting, interviewing, and selecting the right person for the job and the organization
  • Manage projects; from setting scope and selecting a team to delivering on-time, on-budget results
  • Develop a personal leadership style; building power and influence and motivating ‘difficult’ people while avoiding the pitfalls of office politics

Benefits of Using this Book

StrategyDriven Contributors like AMA Business Book Camp for its solid focus on management fundamentals. Edward thoroughly covers the foundational principles and practices every manager must embody in order to be successful. Additionally, the book contains many useful templates that newly promoted managers can add to their personal ‘tool kit’ so to further accelerate their growth into well performing leaders.

While thorough in its discussion of management basics, we found AMA Business Boot Camp to lack the vivid real-world examples that would have brought the application of its concepts to life. This lack of examples diminished the book’s actionable nature; challenging less experienced managers to determine for themselves what the recommended implementation would look like in the workplace environment.

AMA Business Boot Camp contains the complete set of solid management principles and practices every aspiring and newly promoted manager should embody. As such, we believe this book would serve these individuals well as they start their management journey; making AMA Business Boot Camp a StrategyDriven recommended read.

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 65 – An Interview with Ed Reilly, editor of AMA Business Boot Camp

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 65 – An Interview with Ed Reilly, editor of AMA Business Boot Camp explores today’s management and leadership challenges and the fundamentals that will help those in these senior positions achieve ongoing career success. During our discussion, Ed Reilly, editor of AMA Business Boot Camp: Management and Leadership Fundamentals That Will See You Successfully Through Your Career, shares with us his insights and experiences regarding the:

  • AMA Business Boot Camp book reviewthe difference between management and leadership
  • actions corporate leaders should take to close their management talent gaps
  • the biggest challenges facing new managers today and the actions they should take to overcome these difficulties
  • actions aspiring managers and leadership should take to prepare and position themselves for these advanced positions

Additional Information

In addition to the outstanding insights Ed shares in AMA Business Boot Camp and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.amanet.org and playbook.amanet.org. Ed’s book, AMA Business Boot Camp, can be purchased by clicking here.

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About the Author

Ed ReillyEd Reilly is the 17th President and CEO of the American Management Association International. Prior to joining AMA in 2001, he was Presidetn and CEO of Big Flower Holdings, Inc., a leading provider of integrated marketing and advertising services. He also served as President of the McGraw-Hill Broadcasting Company, among various executive positions during his more than 25 years with The McGraw-Hill Companies. To read Ed’s complete biography, click here.

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal, and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Set the Stage for Engagement

Low pay is a dissatisfaction for employees but high pay by itself won’t keep the best people around. Transactional leadership might be a motivator when money and better benefits are available, but today’s climate seems to lend itself more to transformational leadership where a caring leadership can stimulate innovation, creative thinking, and productivity.

In Healing the Wounds, David A. Noer writes how the emotional impact of downsizing and the subsequent extra workload disturbs employee morale and productivity long after the fact. The study found that such feelings of stress, fatigue, and depression can last five years and more, imposing a strain on organizations’ competitiveness. Not only was there a sense of unfairness and anger over top management pay and severance, but symptoms of insecurity, anxiety, and fear that discouraged innovation and creative thinking. As Noer wrote, “There seemed to be a much stronger feeling among lay-off survivors that the organization was not in the business of looking out for its employees and that their loyalty was to themselves and to their unit, not to the overall organization.”

Clearly, after as much as five years, employees still suffered from the “survivor-blaming phenomenon,” as Noer called it. Managers and their staffs were unhappy and could be easily tempted to check out other job possibilities if they surfaced. New recruits heard stories that made them question their decision to join the company ranks.

Gallup, one of the world’s top research organizations, has always found the ratio of engaged to disengaged employees to be problematic. The recent economy would suggest the situation to have become more severe. This would suggest a review of corporate management practices to see that these 12 elements as proposed by Gallup are supported within the organization:


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About the Author

Florence Stone is editorial director for AMA and editor of MWorld, AMA’s quarterly membership journal. She is the author of Coaching, Counseling & Mentoring, The Manager’s Question and Answer Book and The Essential New Manager’s Kit.

To learn more about the American Management Association, click here.

Lock in and Engage Top Talent

In good times and bad, organizations have learned about the impact of thinking that employees are dispensable. Such thought is particularly unwise as the economy improves after a downturn.

During the past few years, companies have lopped off employees in the hundreds of thousands for reasons of economic survival. The staff gaps that resulted are now being felt as those same companies are faced with competition both for business and the top talent they still possess.

Slowly, we are seeing a shift from a buyer’s to a seller’s labor market. There may be a high unemployment problem but HR executives are still complaining about a significant skill gap, that is, a difference in proficiency between the majority of individuals in the market for jobs and those that companies want in their labor force.

Rather than having just a replacement mentality, human resources needs a more strategic approach to the situation—one that finds answers to the coming high turnover. They need a solution that also addresses the bad reputation that the recession has wrought on many companies and that identifies cultural changes that will attract new employees.

Evidence has shown a high correlation between employee job satisfaction and engagement and employee retention and recruitment.

Here are some strategies to engage and retain top talent:


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About the Author

Florence Stone is editorial director for AMA and editor of MWorld, AMA’s quarterly membership journal. She is the author of Coaching, Counseling & Mentoring, The Manager’s Question and Answer Book and The Essential New Manager’s Kit.

To learn more about the American Management Association, click here.