AMA Business Boot Camp: Management and Leadership Fundamentals That Will See You Successfully Through Your Career PDF

Preface

For the past ninety years, the American Management Association has been devoted to the development of managers and leaders throughout their careers. During that time, literally millions of managers and leaders around the world have benefited from AMA's carefully developed seminars, workshops, and books produced by the outstanding faculty and authors who come together to form the backbone of AMA's ability to help people grow in their professional skills.

AMA currently teaches over 160 different seminar topics, covering much of the management landscape. We provide hundreds of webinars, webcasts, podcasts, newsletters, and of course books, which add to the richness of the information available to help managers develop their skills and become more effective. We customize hundreds of individual programs for companies around the world, which ties our insight, experience, and content directly to their business circumstances and helps the entire enterprise move toward a more efficient, effective performance.

This is an important time in the evolution of the business community in the U. S. and around the world. Economic challenges brought about by the financial collapse in 2008 have caused a great deal of disruption that will have a lasting effect for many years to come.

Now, more than ever, we need to relearn and revisit the basics and finetune our skills. We face circumstances that require virtually flawless execution, and we hope you will look to AMA and all of its resources as the perfect place to help you revitalize your own skills and those of your organization.

It is my hope that this book will be an introduction to the principles of effective, efficient management and leadership for some of the people we don't yet touch and that the collective skills they begin to develop through the exposure to these ideas will help them and their organizations. It is our intention to help people become more effective in contributing to the economic engine, which is so essential to our society, prosperity, and security.

For many people, this may be their first exposure to the principles included in this book. For others, it will serve as a comprehensive checklist of the many tasks we must master and execute in the process of becoming successful managers and leaders.

In any case, I hope people will refer back to these pages frequently, as it has been my experience that we all need to be consciously mindful of the many principles of leading and managing people and processes we use on a daily basis in order to be effective. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, management is neither an art nor a science, but rather a practice.

As with all of our work at AMA, it is my hope that this book will be a helpful tool in the development and refinement of your career.