Maximum Performance

Product Description

Based on twelve years involvement with more than two thousand MBAs, managers and professionals, Maximum Performance is a comprehensive analysis of leading and managing people set against a backdrop of accelerating organizational, business and technological change.

It covers traditional topics - such as personal performance and stress management, employee motivation and performance, power and politics, communication skills and leading and managing change, as well as more contemporary issues, such as business ethics in a global economy and leadership in high-tech and virtual organizations. It also looks at how leaders and managers can create cultures to promote essential modern organizational competencies such as creativity and innovation, the effective dissemination and use of knowledge and intellectual capital, and creating systemic intelligent learning capabilities amongst employees.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #2673371 in Books
* Published on: 2005-03-30
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Hardcover
* 594 pages

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher
Based on twelve years involvement with more two thousand MBAs, managers and professionals, Maximum Performance is a comprehensive analysis of leading and managing people set against a backdrop of accelerating organizational, business and technological change.

It covers traditional topics – such as personal performance and stress management, employee motivation and performance, power and politics, communication skills and leading and managing change, as well as more contemporary issues, such as business ethics in a global economy and leadership in high-tech and virtual organizations. It also looks at how leaders and managers can create cultures to promote essential modern organizational competencies such as creativity and innovation, the effective dissemination and use of knowledge and intellectual capital, and creating systemic intelligent learning capabilities amongst employees.

Maximum Performance represents a distillation of the best practical ideas about leadership and people management of recent times, condensed into a form that busy managers and professionals can assimilate and make immediate use of at work in large, medium-sized or small organizations, and in the public or private sector.

About the Author
Nick Forster, Professor of Organizational Behaviour, Graduate School of Management, University of Western Australia
Customer Reviews

Towards Performance Excellence in the Era of Chaotic Competition5
After reading the book, the reader tends to be provoked into thinking about the core values, standards and principles that will underpin her leadership and people management practices in the future.

While illustrating his formulations, Forster has very thoughtfully selected the anecdotes and stories about leaders and managers they worked under, as also their personal experiences of leading and managing others. In the chapter on female managers, he has presented evidence to show that successful leaders and managers in western industrialized countries have personal qualities and competencies that encompass male and female characteristics, and hints towards emergence of "a superior hybrid style that will transcend the traditional male-female stereotype" (p. 542). He has demonstrated a rare degree of professionalism in selecting and putting together the contents of the book, including the material, exercises, questionnaires and self-evaluation exercises. He claims to have "tried and tested them in dozens of leadership and management development courses over the last decade" (p. xiii), and he has included only those materials and exercises that worked for busy managers and professionals.

The book comprehensively covers leadership and people management issues that are topical in the present context of competitiveness in the contemporary business environment. In nutshell, the book has argued that organizations and managers that get most out of their people over a long period of time are the ones which focus not just on setting up systems and processes but focus on people management style, people skills and organizational culture to support the systems and processes.


The author has fully succeeded in delivering what he promises to the reader in the preface. He has used little jargon in building his formulations. The editorial and production quality is outstanding. Most other how-to books on people management are simplistic and tend to be prescriptive of universal magical truths, often through bullet points; they are often unrelated to research underpinnings and the contexts in which the prescriptions can be made use of. For, business dynamics is far more complex than it is presumed to be. Forster has related his formulations mostly with the help of anecdotes and stories, which is the hallmark of this book. But he never loses sight of the wider theoretical underpinnings in his narrations. This is reflected in his quoting the American comedian Groucho Marx when he said, "That's all very well in practice--but how does it work in theory" (p. 538).

This book should be an essential reading for all line and human resource managers, and management consultants. It will also be liked by academics belonging to areas such as leading change, performance management and strategic HRM. More than that, it would be found useful by all leaders, who could pick up a good number of insights from it and also develop perspectives from the analyses made. While I read through this book, I had a feeling, I wish I could author it myself.


Debi S. Saini
Professor of Human Resource Management
Management Development Institute
Mehrauli Road, Gurgaon-122 001.

A POWERFUL, PRACTICAL LEADERSHIP GUIDE5
If we were giving a graduate-level class in leadership and people management skills (we are UCLA Business & Management Program instructors) we would choose this book as the text.

If a client asked for a great book to enhance his/her leadership skills, (we consult in organization, compensation & performance management) this would be one of first books we would suggest.

This book is that good!

The book offers a comprehensive guide for developing leadership and people management skills. It's a powerful, broad-spectrum leadership toolkit with a wealth of information about skills and practices, and hundreds of suggestions and opinions from business and political leaders, consultants, and academics.

This book is an outstanding resource for leaders and aspiring leaders. It is filled with anabundance of insights: the distinction it makes between a leader and a manager is one of the best, if not the best, we've read.

Just few of the subjects covered are: the leadership-as-servant philosophy; leaders as coaches and mentors; communication; motivation; leading and managing teams; women as leaders; managing power, politics and conflict; leading organizational and cultural change; creating an innovative organization; leadership and people management in high-tech, networked; and
virtual organizations.

Throughout the book are bullet-point lists, exercises, and to-the-point conclusions. It is clearly written and superbly organized. An excellent bibliography and subject index top off this outstanding work. We highly recommend this book.

Yvette Borcia & Gerry Stern, Editors
Stern's Management Review