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Title details for I'm Sorry I Broke Your Company by Karen Phelan - Available

I'm Sorry I Broke Your Company

When Management Consultants Are the Problem, Not the Solution

by Karen Phelan
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A Globe and Mail Top Business Book of the Year:“Skewers the mystique of management consultants … [an] entertaining guide for how not to manage a business.” —Publishers Weekly
 
Karen Phelan is sorry. She really is. She tried to do business by the numbers—the management consultant way—developing measures, optimizing processes, and quantifying performance. The only problem is that businesses are run by people. And people can’t be plugged into formulas or summed up in scorecards.
Phelan dissects a whole range of consulting treatments for unhealthy companies and shows why they’re essentially fad diets: superficial would-be fixes that don’t result in lasting improvements and can cause serious damage. With a mix of clear-eyed business analysis, heart-wrenching stories, and hard-won lessons for both consultants and the people who hire them, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore. Karen Phelan and other consultants may have “broken” your company—but she's eager to make amends.
 
“Using tragicomic examples drawn from her experience at a consulting firm, Karen Phelan shows how fad-of-the-day ‘best practices’ can translate into C-level management malpractice, not in-the-trenches results.” —The Dallas Morning News

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 17, 2023

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781609947415

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781609947415
      • File size: 3617 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 29, 2013
      Former Fortune 100 executive Phelan skewers the mystique of management consultants in this entertaining guide for how not to manage a business. Drawing on her own consulting experiences, she portrays them as providing pre-packaged, unproven theoretical constructs that "substitute for getting people to work together better." Phelan argues convincingly that using statistical models to solve all problems exalts the process of measurement above the goals of improving employee efficiency and performance. Phelan's unpretentious style engages the reader in the unfolding revelation that prevailing business models are wrong. If, as she maintains, the misconceptions propagated by the consulting industry underlie many business problems today, a fresh approach is needed. Readers will be intrigued by her thesis that no principles apply universally, and that companies that hire consultants to think for them are courting doom. Her message that consultants can contribute to "a two-way relationship" offers a hopeful contrast to her earlier warnings. Although Phelan belabors her main points, her caution against relying on "one size fits all" advice rings true.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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