20 quick tips for better time management

20 quick tips for better time management.

A bad manager can take a good staff and destroy it, causing the best employees to flee and the remainder to lose all motivation.

London Business School: Impacting management

Professor Michael Jarrett, Professor Nigel Nicholson and Professor Zeger Degraeve talk about impacting management.

Modern Management Principles and The Holy Quran

The Holy Quran, The greatest blessing on humanity, the most comprehensive collection of guiding principles, teaches us, guides us and shows us light in every walk of life. Let it be personal to social matters or issues related with economics, business or politics.

A Muslim is required to believe in its directions, act on them and spread it to others. Ideally that's the only way of success, here and hereafter!!! (Surah Al-Asar), contrary to the fact, today Muslims are those who are found to be living in contradiction with its teachings, but more surprisingly the non-Muslims are now seen more close, of course to not all, but to some of the principles stated in this Great Book.

The principles mentioned in it are ordained to us by The One (SWT) who has designed the Nature, thus the compatibility of these principles with the natural laws is indeed irrefutable for the one who believe in Designer and creator of all. Anyone even a non Muslim, who follows these laws / principles, will probably get the results to the extent or comprehensiveness of his implementation. Like he will save and increase efficiency of his life if he reduced wastefulness, or people will trust in his credibility if he keeps promises and remains honest all the time, et cetera. However his fate in the hereafter cannot be guaranteed.

If we specifically talks about business world, unfortunately today we don't find any Muslim organization (purely) which is considered as a business icon all around the globe. The icons are non Muslim indeed. There exemplary stature inspires everyone seeking guidance in the business world. The leaders among them claim that their success is derived from believing and strictly adhering to certain principles and values (Check "Built to Last by Jim Collins); and surprisingly they are quite similar to what Quran has been trying to infiltrate our deaf ears.

Take Toyota as an example, elimination of wastage (Al-Quran Isra: 26~27, Araf:31) and respect for all (Imran:159, Hujrat:13) is the core of the entire business empire Toyota has developed around the globe. Furthermore when we drill down we see lots of principles which we being Muslims should be experts of. Like Kaizen which is about continuous improvement against inefficiencies or more like Jihad (Ma'idah:35). Or talk about JIT which is about keeping limited inventory or not keeping anything not needed, for a Muslim this should be a state of mind as instructed to him in Baqara:219, Yunus:58 or Tauba:34. Furthermore Toyota emphasis on authenticity of information to an extent that it expects every employee to verify each bit of information on a problem by visiting the site himself, if the employees would have been true Muslims, they would have require no training (Isra:36).

And think about the emphasis on quality of product, at Nike, Nokia, IBM, 3M or Boeing, can anyone really expects them to compromise on this aspect, now think about any Pakistani Brand. Whether it's a shoe, tooth paste, home appliance, etc it's only the pocket constraints that's push people closer to the local brands coming out of factories owned and operated by Muslims! (No doubt there are exceptions) Most local brands don't meet expectations, foreign brands do contrary to the fact that they are manufacturedbro by Non Muslims, most do it for profit of course, but the leaders in the market do it for ideals and withholding to their principles of delivering what is promised to the customers, despites its impact on profitability; as mentioned by Jim Collins in his Book "Built to Last" (Page#8). Surprised! Shouldn't that be expected from the believers of the Holy Book as it clearly states in Mutaffifin:1-3 "Woe to those that deal in fraud,- Those who, when they have to receive by measure from men, exact full measure, But when they have to give by measure or weight to men, give less than due. Do they not think that they will be called to account?" and also in Isra:35, Shaura:181-182, and Rahman:7-9.

The importance of commitments, promises and contracts requires no explanation. Dr. Stephan R. Covey states in his book 'The 8th Habit' (p#169) "Nothing destroys trust faster than making and breaking a promise. Conversely, nothing builds and strengthens trust more than keeping a promise you make". For a Muslim it should be a matter of faith and success in the hereafter (Isra:34, Nahl:91, Ma'idah:1 and Saff:2-3), but these traits are really in a short supply.

These are just a few examples, many more can be quoted. I don't mean to make Toyota, Jim Collins, or Dr. Stephan R. Covey our ideals, in fact I ask you, why look at them for guidance despite the fact we all have access to the most comprehensive set of principles called Quran and the sunnah of the most comprehensive Personality (PBUH)! … Then what stops us?

For Complete Article please visit:
http://www.criticmagazine.pk/PDF/CRITIC_Business_Management_in_Quran.pdf or http://en.calameo.com/books/000014666b600637c4808

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Omar Javaid
Sr. Editor, CRITIC MAG

Management: Doing it right

Rick Spence

From the March 2008 issue of PROFIT magazine

It’s the great mystery of business: how do successful businesspeople marshal their hopes, intentions and objectives and turn them into accomplishments?

Brendan Calder has worked on the solution for 40 years. The Toronto-based entrepreneur and mortgage czar has built and sold several companies, from Canavest House to FirstLine Trust (now CIBC Mortgages Inc.), all of them managed according to his evolving philosophy of focusing on results. He has turned that experience into an MBA course at Toronto’s Rotman School of Management called Getting It Done.

Armed with only a math degree from the University of Waterloo, Calder joined Rotman as entrepreneur-in-residence, but was recently promoted to “effective executive in residence.” Why not? His course in organizational effectiveness attracts some of Rotman’s best. And he promotes it by paraphrasing Ernest Shackleton’s famous advertisement for Antarctic adventurers: “MBAs wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful.”


Calder is only partly kidding. The crucial trait of an effective executive, he says, is courage: the bravery to buck existing systems by insisting on results, and the guts to be judged by them. “Courage is a necessary condition,” he insists. “Courage plus passion plus process equals results.”
As Calder embarked on a new class last month, I asked him to explain what makes for an effective executive. It’s difficult, but there’s a shortcut for you at the end of this story.

Organizational effectiveness begins with Peter Drucker, the late, great management strategist. Drucker bemoaned the recent emphasis on leadership; he believed businesses must focus on results. He popularized “management by objectives” as a way to get managers to stop focusing on mere activities, and instead seek out actions that move the entire organization forward. (Calder says the concept may have started with the Jesuits. “If you were building a mission in the wilderness,” he says, “the Jesuits would tell you to come back in a year and report on how it turned out.” They demanded results.)

Calder’s course emphasizes four of Drucker’s key points: focusing on results, managing by objectives, making effective decisions and prioritizing top management tasks. Sadly, not all of us are as disciplined as the Jesuits. In most companies, says Calder, “Management doesn’t know what the top management tasks are. They think they have to do everything, but they can’t.” It’s all about role clarity, he says. The hardest andmost courageous step is to “focus on contribution” — the key difference you can make — and then insist on measuring the results of your efforts and on being compensated for them.

Getting It Done also draws on the work of Michael Kami, a Florida-based business consultant who served as chief planner for IBM and Xerox in the 1950s and ’60s. In the ’60s, Kami coined the phrase “the speed of change” and urged organizations to become “fast, fluid and flexible.” He called for better, faster strategic planning by continually reviewing your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), adjusting your goals and paying constant attention to market feedback.

But there’s one more side to effectiveness: understanding your personal management style. What creates results for Donald Trump may not work for you. So, Calder’s formula includes the 3-D Theory of William J. Reddin, a British-born, New Brunswick-based management expert of the 1970s. Reddin noted that most people tend to be relationship-oriented or task-oriented, and that both styles are appropriate in different situations. By applying an “effectiveness filter” to individual style, Reddin gave managers the awareness (and permission) to adapt their personal styles to the context. “If you want to get things done,” sums up Calder, “you have to learn to flex your style.”

Fittingly, most of the work in Calder’s class goes on outside the classroom. The 25 students spend much of their time observing Calder’s principles in action at one of several local organizations, such as FirstLine and the Toronto International Film Festival, that have embraced all or most of Calder’s effectiveness formula.

Anthony Pittiglio, a 2007 Rotman grad who now works as an internal consultant with RBC Financial in Toronto, says the key concept he took from Calder’s course is “alignment at all levels”: without alignment, there can be no shared objectives and no results. At first, he resisted Calder’s contention that seeming intangibles such as customer satisfaction can be quantified. But now, he says, he understands that “when you find the key activities that can be measured, that’s how you get a truly output-focused organization.”

Since Calder’s course can hardly be summarized in 800 words, I asked him to reveal his top three tips for PROFIT readers. He responded by tossing a book at me: The Effective Executive in Action, a vinyl-bound workbook that prompts you to take notes and generate your own effectiveness manifesto by following the Drucker framework. Calder’s three tips: “Buy it. Read it. Do it.”

What leadership means

THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT by Peter Drucker, renowned management expert, states that "leadership cannot be created or promoted. It cannot be taught or learned. Leadership is not magnetic personality – that can just as well be demagoguery. It is not making friends and influencing people – that is salesmanship."
"Leadership is the lifting of a man's vision to higher sights, the raising of a man's performance to a higher standard, the building of a man's personality beyond its normal limitations. Leadership requires aptitude and basic attitudes. And nothing is as difficult to define, nothing as difficult to change as basic attitudes. Practices, though humdrum, can always be practised whatever a man's aptitudes, personality or attitudes. They require no genius – only application."
The above is more than a mouthful and should cause us to contemplate the correctness or otherwise of assertions which, in recent times, have permeated our airspace. Tomorrow's senior positions will be filled by men who today occupy junior positions. Drucker argues: "I have yet to see any method that can predict a man's development more than a short time ahead."
Our nation has been blessed with leaders of immense talent. Needless to say, a critical review could easily disclose that some were more gifted than others but that each started from a position of minimal known expertise in the task of leading the country. Some achieved more than others. It could be argued that some achieved little.
Yet, our country has advanced and remains an object of admiration certainly for the wider Caribbean and for some countries by no means our neighbours. What factors contributed to these gains? Have we realised our full potential? The answer is a definite 'no'.
Our major contributors to success have been our educational facilities, respect for law and order, and our religious fervour. No wonder we have been able to change our leaders without unusual fanfare and by peaceful transfer of power. We have respected the notion that each man brings different qualities and that a man can learn only so much so fast.
The hallmark of management today is its success in facing adaptive challenges. Changes in societies, markets, customers, competition and technology are forcing leaders to clarify their values, develop new strategies and impose new operational techniques.
The Harvard Business Review of January 1997 quotes chief executive officer of Scandinavian Airlines, Jan Carlzonas, saying: "One of the most interesting missions of leadership is getting people on the executive team to listen to and learn from one another. Held in debate, people can learn their way to collective solutions when they understand one another's assumptions. The work of the leader is to get conflict out into the open and use it as a source of creativity."
Globalisation, whatever it means, requires leaders, accustomed as they are to solving problems themselves, to adopt new methods. Drucker argues: "Leaders do not need to know all the answers. They need to ask the right questions. --(Nation News)

Management: Leaders and responsibility

By Stefan Stern
January 23 2008

Harvard Business School celebrates its centenary this year. We can look forward to a series of grand events, much back-slapping and frequent blowing of its own trumpet. But how energetically will the great school salute the achievements of perhaps its most famous alumnus of all, George W. Bush (class of ’75)? It seems unlikely that the outgoing US president will be claimed as a poster boy for the Master of Business Administration (MBA) qualification any time soon.
Maybe this Bush administration merely represents an embarrassing hiccup in the otherwise increasingly deep and intimate relationship between commerce and elected leaders. The worlds of politics and business inevitably overlap, and collide. What President Dwight D. Eisenhower once labelled the “military-industrial complex”, we might rebrand as “politico-commercial”.
Even in this era of (more or less) free markets, trade takes place within the constraints of man-made regulation. Some politicians may remain uninterested in the business of wealth creation, and some business people may be left cold by the idiosyncrasies of democratic politics – but each side has to deal with the other.
The smartest actively seek cross-fertilisation. When JP Morgan, the US investment bank, snapped up the newly available former British prime minister Tony Blair earlier this month – to serve as an adviser for an estimated $5m a year – some of the sceptical noises that greeted the news were inspired by simple professional jealousy. Mr Blair had already turned down several offers from commercial organisations, his friends maintained. But he does plan to accept a few more. The ex-prime minister’s access to key figures and his understanding of how geo-political trends are likely to develop make him a highly valuable commodity.
Indeed, Mr Blair had long been attracted by the qualities, as he saw them, of successful business leaders. When he wanted to convince the sceptical British electorate in 1996 that his Labour party could be trusted to form a competent government, he turned to his growing body of friends in the business community for inspiration. Encouraged in particular by his contacts with BP, the oil company – a relationship that grew increasingly important as his time in office went on – Mr Blair conceived a series of “performance commitments” that he made to the British people. These commitments, five of them, were printed on a credit-card sized “pledge card”, and carried by Labour party candidates.
This was state-of-the-art performance management introduced to the scruffy world of party politics. The message was: do not bother reading our unwieldy, old-fashioned manifesto. Focus on these modest, practical and business-like proposals instead. Vote Labour – or your money back. And in the course of his 10 years in office, Mr Blair continued to seek the insights and experience of business leaders to lead enquiries, policy groups and task forces.
George Bush too, when he entered the White House in 2001, appeared determined to make the most of business expertise. His administration has been packed with former corporate executives. His vice-president, Dick Cheney, had been chief executive at Halliburton, the engineering and services company. His first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, had been CEO of Alcoa, the aluminium company, while Mr O’Neill’s successor, John Snow, had been CEO of CSX, a transport business. Mr Snow’s successor, Hank Paulson, was CEO of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. President Bush’s first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had been CEO of the pharmaceutical company GD Searle between 1977 and 1985 – before it was bought by Monsanto. Not for nothing was this known as “the CEO administration”.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s key adviser, spoke with admiration of his boss’s business-like administrative skills. Gone was the chaos and aimless late-night chat of the Bill Clinton administration. In the Bush era, meetings would start and end on time. Ties would be worn. President Bush is said to be a great believer in Peter Drucker’s now rather dated idea of “management by objectives”, or MBO. “I had read Peter Drucker, but I’d never seen Drucker until I saw Bush in action,” Mr Rove once said in an interview with Atlantic Monthly, the political magazine. President Bush has also revealed how business school influenced his approach to the job. “Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world,” he wrote in his 1999 book A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House.
In October 2002, before his early departure from the administration, Mr O’Neill visited Harvard Business School. He told the assembled students that much was expected of them. “The world is desperate for the application of what you’re learning here,” he said. “Not only do you have the talent and the tools – you have the obligation.”
Today, the worlds of business and politics look towards each other with greater intensity than ever. The theme for this year’s meeting at Davos is “The Power of Collaborative Innovation”. Business and political leaders will look to learn from each other. One session at Davos exemplifies this. It is called: “Rebuilding Brand America: Five Suggestions for the Future President.”
And yet both parties to this collaborative conversation should take care. Critics – perhaps we should properly say cynics – will be closely watching what they do. As Professor Henry Mintzberg (no friend of MBA orthodoxy) of Montreal’s McGill Univeristy has said: “Davos: where the people who spend 51 weeks a year creating all our problems take another week to see if they can fix them.”
If that sounds harsh, remember these words from President Eisenhower when he gave his farewell address on January 17, 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought ... The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Stefan Stern is the FT’s Management columnist

The Difference Between Management And Leadership

Leadership and management are two notions that are often used interchangeably. However, these words actually describe two different concepts. In this section, we shall discuss these differences and explain why both terms are thought to be similar. Leadership is a facet of management: Leadership is just one of the many assets a successful manager must possess. Care must be taken in distinguishing between the two concepts. The main aim of a manager is to maximise the output of the organisation through administrative implementation. To achieve this, managers must undertake the following functions:
- organisation
- planning
- staffing
- directing
- controlling
Leadership is just one important component of the directing function. A manager cannot just be a leader, he also needs formal authority to be effective. "For any quality initiative to take hold, senior management must be involved and act as a role model. This involvement cannot be delegated." In some circumstances, leadership is not required. For example, self motivated groups may not require a single leader and may find leaders dominating. The fact that a leader is not always required proves that leadership is just an asset and is not essential. Differences In Perspectives: Managers think incrementally, whilst leaders think radically. "Managers do things right, while leaders do the right thing." [2]. This means that managers do things by the book and follow company policy, while leaders follow their own intuition, which may in turn be of more benefit to the company. A leader is more emotional than a manager . "Men are governed by their emotions rather than their intelligence". This quotation illustrates why teams choose to follow leaders. "Leaders stand out by being different. They question assumption and are suspicious of tradition. They seek out the truth and make decisions based on fact, not prejudice. They have a preference for innovation." Subordinate As A Leader: Often with small groups, it is not the manager who emerges as the leader. In many cases it is a subordinate member with specific talents who leads the group in a certain direction. "Leaders must let vision, strategies, goals, and values be the guide-post for action and behaviour rather than attempting to control others." When a natural leader emerges in a group containing a manager, conflict may arise if they have different views. When a manager sees the group looking towards someone else for leadership he may feel his authority is being questioned. Loyalty: Groups are often more loyal to a leader than a manager. This loyalty is created by the leader taking responsibility in areas such as:
- Taking the blame when things go wrong.

- Celebrating group achievements, even minor ones.
- Giving credit where it is due.
"The leader must take a point of highlighting the successes within a team, using charts or graphs, with little presentations and fun ideas" . Leaders are observant and sensitive people. They know their team and develop mutual confidence within it." The Leader Is Followed. The Manager Rules: A leader is someone who people naturally follow through their own choice, whereas a manager must be obeyed. A manager may only have obtained his position of authority through time and loyalty given to the company, not as a result of his leadership qualities. A leader may have no organisational skills, but his vision unites people behind him.Management Knows How It Works:Management usually consists of people who are experienced in their field, and who have worked their way up the company. A manager knows how each layer of the system works and may also possess a good technical knowledge. A leader can be a new arrival to a company who has bold, fresh, new ideas but might not have experience or wisdom. Conclusion: Managing and leading are two different ways of organising people. The manager uses a formal, rational method whilst the leader uses passion and stirs emotions. William Wallace is one excellent example of a brilliant leader but could never be thought of as the manager of the Scots! - (Univ of Edinburgh)