THE FAST TRACK WAY
Everything you need to accelerate
your career
ix
The best way to fast track your career as a manager is to fast track the
contribution you and your team make to your organisation and for your
team to be successful in as public a way as possible. That’s what the
Fast Track series is about. The Fast Track manager delivers against per-
formance expectations, is personally highly effective and efficient,
develops the full potential of their team, is recognised as a key opinion
leader in the business, and ultimately progresses up the organisation
ahead of their peers.
You will benefit from the books in the Fast Track series whether you
are an ambitious first-time team leader or a more experienced manager
who is keen to develop further over the next few years. You may be a
specialist aiming to master every aspect of your chosen discipline or
function, or simply be trying to broaden your awareness of other key
management disciplines and skills. In either case, you will have the moti-
vation to critically review yourself and your team using the tools and
techniques presented in this book, as well as the time to stop, think and
act on areas you identify for improvement.
Do you know what you need to know and do to make a real differ-
ence to your performance at work, your contribution to your company
and your blossoming career? For most of us, the honest answer is ‘Not
really, no’. It’s not surprising then that most of us never reach our full
potential. The innovative Fast Track series gives you exactly what you
need to speed up your progress and become a high performance
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manager in all the areas of the business that matter. Fast Track is not
just another How to’ series. Books on selling tell you how to win sales
but not how to move from salesperson to sales manager. Project man-
agement software enables you to plan detailed tasks but doesn’t
improve the quality of your project management thinking and business
performance. A marketing book tells you about the principles of market-
ing but not how to lead a team of marketers. It’s not enough.
Specially designed features in the Fast Track books will help you to
see what you need to know and to develop the skills you need to be
successful. They give you:
the information required for you to shine in your chosen func-
tion or skill particularly in the Fast Track top ten;
practical advice in the form of Quick Tips and answers to FAQs
from people who have been there before you and succeeded;
state of the art best practice as explained by today’s academics
and industry experts in specially written Expert Voices;
case stories and examples of what works and, perhaps more
importantly, what doesn’t work;
comprehensive tools for accelerating the effectiveness and
performance of your team;
a framework that helps you to develop your career as well as
produce terrific results.
Fast Track is a resource of business thinking, approaches and techniques
presented in a variety of ways in short, a complete performance support
environment. It enables managers to build careers from their first tenta-
tive steps into management all the way up to becoming a business
director accelerating the performance of their team and their career.
When you use the Fast Track approach with your team it provides a
common business language and structure, based on best business
practice. You will benefit from the book whether or not others in the
organisation adopt the same practices; indeed if they don’t, it will give
you an edge over them. Each Fast Track book blends hard practical
advice from expert practitioners with insights and the latest thinking from
experts from leading business schools.
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The Fast Track approach will be valuable to team leaders and man-
agers from all industry sectors and functional areas. It is for ambitious
people who have already acquired some team leadership skills and
have realised just how much more there is to know.
If you want to progress further you will be directed towards additional
learning and development resources via an interactive Fast Track web-
site www.Fast-Track-Me.com. For many, these books therefore become
the first step in a journey of continuous development. So, the Fast Track
approach gives you everything you need to accelerate your career, offer-
ing you the opportunity to develop your knowledge and skills, improve
your team’s performance, benefit your organisation’s progress towards
its aims and light the fuse under your true career potential.
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