Improving Your Management Skills by Rodney Overton

The author has many case studies and famous leaders' management styles in this book which makes this book as good as reading the biographies of those leaders. With only 153 pages and easily read fonts, this book is a easy read.

The 3 main skills are Management Skills, Human Resource Skills and Marketing Skills. In management skills, it started off with a good definition of what is a good manager and the leadership qualities of a leader. Today, many businesses have to make radical changes to the way they manage to survive. The steps to implement changes, the risk to manage, the strategies involving human resource, service and lastly on benchmarking are elaborated under management skills chapter.

Human Resource Skills talks about the manager's personality. What personalities are good or bad? Then, it went on about retaining talents, communication and learning, coaching, managing stress and how fitness of staff can increase productivity and morale in the company.

Marketing Skills are the skills needed to market a product or service. The chapter shows the factors influencing the consumer and the marketing basics for a business.

The last chapter is all about case studies, which includes Jack Welch of GE.

This is a good read which is suitable for beginner in the junior management level.

Managing Quality - Ned Hamson and Amy Zuckerman

As I am tasked to ensure the quality standards in my department are in compliance with the ISO, I have always wanted to read some literature so that I can find ideas on how to improve the department's quality. But never did as the "quality" books are so thick and difficult to read. When i saw this book, I immediate bought it. Primarily, it's a small book and is only 130 pages. Makes it handy to carry and easy to read between travels.

This book is good for one who just started out in the quality field. It explains what is quality, how quality was "borned", how and why the ISO standards started and evloved and the 3 main people who started the quality movement; Philip B. Crosby, W. Edward Deming and Joseph M. Juran. It gives a brief history on ISO 9000 and the adaptation of it by the Americans so as to match the sales of the Japanese automotive industry.

The authors gives some pointers as to evaluate if a company is serious in going for the ISO certification. It ended with some basic steps on starting a ISO quality system. There is a chapter with 4 case studies, which I found more interesting. The 3rd case study which described Solectron was inspiring. As Lucent Technologies, Solectron's customer was not satisfied with the no. of defects, the team used the Kaizen process for a week and the results are 1) 46% productivity improvement, 2) 33% reduction in amount of floor space needed for the activity and 50% reduction in the incident of rejects. All these were acheived in a week!

Overall, this book is good for a beginner in qualtiy.