Followup to Napoleon on Project Management Announced

Now that the press release is out, I'm pleased to announce the followup book to Napoleon on Project Management.

Tentatively titled Managing the Gray Areas, the book touches on many topics, such as principles, ethics, decision-making, incentives, staffing, critical thinking, and communication. For those familiar with my writings on lessons from history, rest assured that there will be plenty of lessons from history, as well as from philosophy, science, art, medicine, and business. Ultimately, it's a book about leading with humanity.

I'm also happy to announce that the book will be published by RMC Publications, the publishing arm of Rita Mulcahy's RMC Project Management. Many of you are familiar with Rita and her organization from their superb training products and services. Making this deal especially appealing was their shift in strategy toward taking on a small selection of new books (including general management and leadership books), and building products and services around them. I'm honored to be the first author to be signed to their organization under this new strategy.

I decided to write this book to address the many challenges that leaders face for which there is no easy answer. While consultants and magazine articles promote quick fixes and universal formulas, management is never that simple. In the book, I address tough questions, such as:

• How do you balance the need for responsiveness to the customer with the need for process control within your department or team?
• How do you maintain visibility of available resources without adding undue bureaucracy to your staff?
• How can you manage your time effectively, yet remain available to your people?
• Are recurring meetings effective or are they time wasters?
• When should you share the big picture with your team and when is it prudent not to?
• Should one person be expected to serve as a strategist and a tactician?
• Which is better; a generalist or a specialist?
• Which will give the biggest return; a good image or high quality?
• What should you do when an ethical dilemma challenges your core principles?

A while back, I entered some blogs on PMThink related to these topics, based on the two-day seminar I conducted in Philadelphia with productivity consultant Jerome Jewell. Since then, I did some fine-tuning and further research and saw the need for this book.

Of course, you can expect to see more blogs related to my research as I write the book, and from time to time I may ask for your opinions and examples. Meanwhile, here's the press release from RMC Publications...

RMC Publications Signs Agreement with Best-Selling Author Jerry Manas