Never Mind the Bosses: Hastening the Death of Deference for Business Success

Over the last few decades, power, information and resources have moved from being concentrated in the hands of a few, to being disbursed across many. We need look no further than events on the world stage to see the heat signature of this – from the arrival of Wikileaks, the Arab Spring of 2011 and the Occupy movements, to the social media revolution and flashpoints such as the British Members of Parliament expenses scandal. All are examples of deep change occurring.

This book is about what this means for the workplace and for management. The proposition offered here is that our organisations need to catch up, and that the "death of deference" that we are seeing elsewhere in society needs to be accelerated in the workplace.

Systems of deference slow down organisational performance. Deference prevents organisations from learning. It stops them from being agile, innovative and ethical. Deference is the enemy of organisational success and it needs to be dismantled so that in its place we can build modern organisations with a new breed of managers and leaders. This book offers a solution to a problem that belongs in the last century, and a game plan for nothing short of a workplace revolution.

"If deference is dead, this book is about the resurrection of the effective manager in a world where nothing is quite the way it used to be. Powerful and thought-provoking from start to finish."

- Jeremy Vine, BBC Presenter and Author

"Never Mind the Bosses is a refreshing type of management book, it advocates that deference to authority figures needs to go if we are to have engaged workforces."

- Cary L. Cooper, CBE, Distinguished Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University Management School

"An engaging and entertaining romp through the post punk world. By going beyond the boundaries of most business books, Ryde gives us all food for thought about how organisations are, or are not, dealing with a rapidly changing society and workforce."

- Jo Owen, bestselling author of 'How to Manage' and 'How to Lead'

"If you are looking for a book that will shake up your thinking about how to improve your organization's performance – or worried that your competitors will find it first! – try this one."

- Professor Dutch Leonard, Harvard Business School & Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government