年近50，回顾MBA后看过的管理书籍与现实管理经历。发现有关管理的书籍汗牛充栋，但是大多内容是关乎“应该怎样”，很少有直接面对告知现实中如何。规范的理想与冷酷的现实之间差距巨大。可以说，按照管理书籍行事的管理者一定会成为失败者---不要太相信管理大师美化之言。如果我们知道杰克韦尔奇、比尔盖茨、乔布斯在为人管理中的另外一面，其他人的真实评价与书中宣导的巨大差距后，我们还会迷信他们所做所为吗？
现实但不美好的推荐书籍如： the leadership BS, the dictator's handbook, 48 laws of poers.
There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them. If there were principles and fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts and a man cannot be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.
I thought to myself with what means, with what deceptions, with how many varied arts, with what industry a man sharpens his wits to deceive another, and through these variations the world is made more beautiful.
The most important of these skills, and power’s crucial foundation, is the ability to master your emotions. Anger is the most destructive of emotional responses, for it clouds your vision the most. Love and affection are also potentially destructive, in that they blind you to the often self-serving interests of those whom you least suspect of playing a power game.
Related to mastering your emotions is the ability to distance yourself from the present moment and think objectively about the past and future. Like Janus, the double-faced Roman deity and guardian of all gates and doorways, you must be able to look in both directions at once, the better to handle danger from wherever it comes. Such is the face you must create for yourself—one face looking continuously to the future and the other to the past.
Power requires the ability to play with appearance. To this end you must learn to wear many masks and keep a bag full of deceptive tricks. Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power.
Power is essentially amoral and one of the most important skills to acquire is the ability to see circumstances rather than good or evil. Power is a game—this cannot be repeated too often—and in games you do not judge your opponents by their intentions but by the effect of their actions. You measure their strategy and their power by what you can see and feel.
What does it matter if another player, your friend or rival, intended good things and had only your interests at heart, if the effects of his action lead to so much ruin and confusion? It is only natural for people to cover up their actions with all kinds of justifications, always assuming that they have acted out of goodness. You must learn to inwardly laugh each time you hear this and never get caught up in gauging someone’s intentions and actions through a set of moral judgments that are really an excuse for the accumulation of power.
It is a game. Your opponent sits opposite you. Both of you behave as gentleman or ladies, observing the rules of the game and taking nothing personally. You play with a strategy and you observe your opponent’s moves with as much calmness as you can muster. In the end, you will appreciate the politeness of those you are playing with more than their good and sweet intentions. Train your eye to follow the results of their moves, the outward circumstances, and do not be distracted by anything else.
Half of your mastery of power comes from what you do not do, what you do not allow yourself to get dragged into. For this skill you must learn to judge all things by what they cost you. “The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us.” In the end, life is short, opportunities are few, and you have only so much energy to draw on. And in this sense time is as important a consideration as any other. Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others—that is too high a price to pay.
Power is a social game. To learn and master it, you must develop the ability to study and understand people. To be a master player you must also be a master psychologist. An understanding of people’s hidden motives is the single greatest piece of knowledge you can have in acquiring power. It opens up endless possibilities of deception, seduction, and manipulation.
“Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.”
“To have a good enemy, choose a friend: He knows where to strike.”
“Every time I bestow a vacant office, I make a hundred discontented persons and one ingrate.”—Louis XIV
You destroy an enemy when you make a friend of him.
read book "Making things happen: mastering project management" by Scott Berkun
In the updated edition of this critically acclaimed and bestselling book, Microsoft project veteran Scott Berkun offers a collection of essays on field-tested philosophies and strategies for defining, leading, and managing projects. Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere. Based on his nine years of experience as a program manager for Internet Explorer and lead program manager for Windows and MSN, Berkun explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to get through a large software or web development project. Making Things Happen doesn't cite specific methods, but focuses on philosophy and strategy. Unlike other project management books, Berkun offers personal essays in a comfortable style and easy tone that emulate the relationship of a wise project manager who gives good, entertaining and passionate advice to those who ask. Topics include:
How to make things happen
Making good decisions
Specifications and requirements
Ideas and what to do with them
How not to annoy people
Leadership and trust
The truth about making dates
What to do when things go wrong
Complete with a new forward from the author and a discussion guide for forming reading groups/teams, Making Things Happen offers in-depth exercises to help you apply lessons from the book to your job. It is inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, and definitely the one book that you and your team need to have within arm's reach throughout the life of your project. Coming from the rare perspective of someone who fought difficult battles on Microsoft'sbiggest projects and taught project design and management for MSTE, Microsoft's internal best practices group, this is valuable advice indeed. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.
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