Julian Birkinshaw 
Becoming A Better Boss 
Why Good Management is So Difficult

An employee’s-eye view of what makes a great boss–and how
you can become one

Whereas most books on managing people approach the subject from
the perspective of a manager of an idealised organisation,
Becoming a Better Boss takes a real-world approach, looking
at the topic from the perspective of an employee in a real-world
organisation–dysfunctions, warts, and all. Focusing on the
choices individual employees make every day in getting work done,
this book reinvents the practice of management one employee at a
time.

Author Julian Birkinshaw stresses the importance of taking
management seriously, reveals where management practice often goes
wrong, and dives deeply into the worldview of employees. He then
explores the common personal biases and frailties of managers and
discusses the vital importance of experimentation to overcome the
limitations and idiosyncrasies of a particular organisation.
Throughout, he supports his assertions with case studies from a
wide and varying range of management experiments and situations at
real companies.

* Written by a leading authority on strategy, management, and
innovation who is also the author of eleven books, including
Reinventing Management

* Introduces a new approach to management focused on real
employees and actual situations

* Includes case studies from real organisations

Between the stress of deadlines and the demands of today’s
business environment, it’s easy for managers to lose sight of the
importance of people management. Becoming a Better Boss not
only shows managers how to lead effectively, but why doing so is
vitally important to every organisation’s success.

Table of Content

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xv

1 Why Management Matters 1

2 So What Is Good Management Really? 17

3 Getting Inside the Minds of Your Employees: What Makes Them Tick? 35

4 Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Your Employees 57

5 Doing What We Know We Should: Managing As an Unnatural Act 81

6 Experimentation: Functioning in a Broken System 107

7 The Future of Management? 129

Endnotes 143

Index 149

About the author

Julian Birkinshaw is Professor and Chair of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School. He has Ph D and MBA degrees in Business from the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Durham. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Stockholm School of Economics, 2009.
Professor Birkinshaw’s main area of expertise is in the strategy and management of large multinational corporations, and on such specific issues as corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, subsidiary-headquarters relationship, knowledge management, network organizations, and global customer management. He is the author of eleven other books, including Reinventing Management: Smarter Choices for Getting Work Done (Revised and Updated Edition 2012), Giant Steps in Management (2007), Inventuring: Why Big Companies Must Think Small (2003), Leadership the Sven-Goran Eriksson Way (2002) and Entrepreneurship in the Global Firm (2001), and over seventy articles in such journals as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Strategy Management Journal and Academy of Management Journal. He is active as a consultant and executive educator to many large companies, including Rio Tinto, SAP, GSK, ABB, Ericsson, Kone, Petrofac, WPP, Bombardier, Sara Lee, HSBC, Akzo Nobel, Roche, Thyssen Krupp, UBS, PWC, Coloplast, BBC, Unilever and Novo Nordisk.
In 1998 the leading British Management magazine Management Today profiled Professor Birkinshaw as one of six of the ‘Next Generation of Management Gurus’. He is regularly quoted in international media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and The Times. He speaks regularly at business conferences in the UK, Europe, North America and Australia.
Professor Birkinshaw is co-founder with best-selling author Gary Hamel of the Management Innovation Lab (MLab), a unique partnership between academia and business that is seeking to accelerate the evolution of management.