I just returned from the Academy of Management National meeting (www.aomonline.org). Just in case you wonder what I was doing there, this is an audience of over 7,000 management professors who should be interested in my second book, The Ugly Truth about Managing People. (www.theuglytruthaboutmanagingpeople.com). The book covers the stories of 50 management issues that we deal with every day and how to solve them. It is business reality. Not theory.
I got two totally different reactions to my book. Either the professors didn’t want to know anything about it because they were happy in their cocoons or they wanted to know everything about it. There was no middle ground.
I found that the management professors who didn’t want to know anything about the book had their heads in the sand. They were comfortable teaching theory and didn’t care about reality. Imagine all of those bright young minds who will be exposed only to theory rather than what they will be exposed to in the real world when they get out of school. Many of those professors had never been in the real world either. No wonder they didn’t care.
Contrast this with the professors who were lamenting the fact that their students thought the real world was easy…and they need a book like mine to show them what the working world was really like.
So, do you have your head in the sand, preferring only to see what you want to see; whether it is real or not? If your business or a department is losing money are you dealing with it or are you dreaming that it will magically turn around without making
some hard decisions?