Description
Confessions of a Street-Smart Manager is a tough-minded guide to corporate success, based on David Mahoney’s own brilliant career as a street-smart executive.
Mahone, a Bronx-born self-made made and a gifted athlete, began his career as an ad agency mail clerk. Three years later, he became the youngest VP in the agency’s history. Next came the presidency of the Good Humor Corporation, Executive VP at Colgate-Palmolive, and finally the top spot at Norton Simon, where he was the first CEO in American business history to draw a million-dollar salary.
In Confessions of a Street-Smart Manager, he shows how he achieved that success, with stories that run the gamut of melted ice-cream bars to major takeover attempts, product launches, tales of his own power plays, and wonderful anecdotes featuring everyone from Jimmy Carter, the Archbishop of New York, Henry Kissinger, and Don Meredith to major corporate players like Sony’s Akio Morita and billionaire Norton Simon.
Each entertaining story illustrates a point of street-smart management: the danger of subverting one’s opinions to please the powerful; the importance of tempering a questioning attitude with diplomacy; the relative merits of “Good News” and “BD News” leadership; ways to recognize star managers, caretakers, and incompetents; how to recognize when fear and greed are being used as motivational tools; and more.
Among the many “need-to-knows” hew covers for the ambitious are:
- Networking
- How to save face
- Learning from your mistakes
- How to avoid being trapped by Experts
- Risk taking
- How to gain control of your time
- And dozens of other things you have to know if you’re going to become street-smart.
For everyone who wants to develop the vital blend of shrewd practicality, energy, and resiliency known as “street smarts”, Mahoney is the perfect mentor. And for everyone in business who wants a close-up look at a CEO’s success-orientated perspective, Confessions of a Street-Smart Manager is a fast-paced, irreverent read, the Up the Organisation! of the 1980s.
“The lessons taught in this book may be drawn mainly from a life in business, but their value is not limited to the management of commercial enterprise. The author is one of the Renaissance executives who has applied the techniques and tricks of uniquely practical management to all areas well beyond the world of making money. He planned the American Revolution Bicentennial, promoted equal high-level opportunity for women long before that became a general goal, and heads a foundation that seeks out and sponsors the most advanced research in medicine…
“The value of this book is in the way David Mahoney has interpreted his experience-triumphs, poignancies, glories, setbacks-through the prism of a manager with a special style. He calls it street-smart management, and it is applicable not merely to a way of doing business, but to a way of living-a unique way that develops the two-way boulevards of personal loyalty, that is proud of the Mother’s Day cakes of sentiment, and that sharpens the peripheral vision needed to spot the 12-speed bicycles of danger approaching from any direction.” – William Safire
Hardcover, 191 pages. In very good preloved condition with the exception of minor fading to dustcover, and a couple of page corners creased.
