The Busy Leader's Handbook

Acknowledgments

Norm Adams was a wonderful friend and mentor to many. Years ago, I was thanking him for being such a great help to me. When I was done, he looked at me and said, “One area we may never agree on is who is helping who more.” His message was that somehow his taking time to guide and teach me was helping him as much or more as it helped me. Today, some 20 years later, I understand to the core of my soul what he meant.

I was once asked in an interview to talk about a turning point in my own career. As with most people, there are many turning points. The one I shared was watching the video In Search of Excellence, then reading the book of the same title by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman. At the time I was a new supervisor and I felt totally unprepared. I was too afraid to share with others how “in over my head” I felt. The local library in Janesville, Wisconsin, was showing a film of Tom Peters talking about excellence, so I went. While I knew I still had a long way to go, the film and then the book provided me the hope that maybe I could do this leadership thing.

I hope this book will do the same for others, that it provides them with new skills, reinforces what is already being done, and/or provides adjustments to actions to make leadership more effective and rewarding.

A name could be put on each chapter of a person and an organization that brought about the learnings. At times these tips were developed in a work session with a group of managers on how ...