Say Thank You for Everything: The secrets of being a great manager - strategies and tactics that get results

by Jim Edwards

Overview

Say Thank You for Everything is a bullshit-free guide to management that shows you the right way to lead a business, inspired by Jim Edwards’s experience of helping to transform a small unread blog into a business with 200 million readers and hundreds of employees, which finally sold for $442m.

Based on a legendary internal email that distilled 19 things a new manager might find helpful, Say Thank You for Everything will show you:

- the ‘whales and fails’ method of decision-making that systematically improves your team’s results

- the incredible power of being slightly better than average

- why good hiring is 80% of everything

- how to increase productivity and reduce burnout at the same time

- why your teams should never be bigger than five people

- the importance of taking your enemies to lunch

- the surprising places great ideas actually come from

- the dark arts of successful management

- and much, much more.

You might be a brand-new boss unsure where to start, or a struggling supervisor thinking of throwing it in, or perhaps someone who just doesn’t want to lose their humanity on the way to the executive suite. Say Thank You for Everything will help you look after your people, get results for your business, and be the kind of boss you always wanted to have yourself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857199348
Publisher:	Harriman House
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jim Edwards was the editor-in-chief of Insider's news division and was the founding editor of Business Insider UK. He has also been a managing editor at Adweek, and a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at the Columbia Business School. His work has appeared in Slate, Salon, The Independent, MTV, The Nation and AOL. He won the Neal award for business journalism in 2005 for a series investigating bribes and kickbacks in the advertising business.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Boss Who Bit People 1

I Leadership 9

1 Day One: What the fuck is going on? 11

2 America's worst-ever pizza restaurant as a model of good leadership 20

3 Change is better than standing in the dust at the side of the road, saying "But we have always done it this way!" 27

4 The war against mushroom farming: How to communicate effectively 34

II Productivity 45

5 Prioritize & delete: The Eisenhower Matrix for increasing productivity 47

6 Whales & fails: How to get good work out of your team 56

7 The incredible power of being slightly better than average 65

8 How new ideas improve performance: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics 75

9 The strip-club problem and why good data is the solution 81

10 The cure for acne and the difference between good data and good judgment 87

III People 91

11 Org charts and how I learned I was totally wrong to hate them 93

12 The Myers-Briggs test and why you absolutely should not use it 97

13 Hiring: Why soccer teams don't recruit their own fans 102

14 How to hire people who are better than you 114

15 The Van Halen test: Who you should promote 124

16 Managing up: The monkey on your back 133

17 Encouraging level-four behavior 139

18 Use goal-setting to end management by anecdote 144

19 Pay negotiations: "What the hell does it take to give someone a pay rise in this town?" 149

20 Toxic rock stars and knaves: The people you don't want on your team 163

21 How to fire someone without being a jerk about it 172

22 Problem solving: How to prevent civil war in your office 176

23 The dark arts: Tricks for dealing with difficult people 184

IV Decisions 197

24 The worst job I ever had taught me the three most important things to know about management 199

25 Principle: Apple fights the FBI to protect the privacy of terrorists 206

26 Strategy: How Amazon created Earth's greatest toy store and then burned it to the ground 214

27 Tactics: Why trains actually do run on time 223

28 Category errors: The art of getting it wrong 228

Thats It 231

Thank You 235

Index 237

About the Author 243

Editorial Reviews

Most management advice books are incredibly boring. This one most definitely isn’t. It's a great read for new managers.

Donna Munday, executive producer, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

As the original recipient of Jim’s email that inspired this book, I can tell you first hand that his management advice is truly timeless. It has helped me time and again throughout my career. And true to Jim’s own management style, this book is equal parts smart, funny, blunt and helpful.

Alyson Shontell, editor-in-chief and CCO at Fortune

Gossipy, fun, insightful and simple – Say Thank You For Everything is the management book that works on great anecdotes, not tenuous metaphors. Enjoy these memorable examples of how to get it right at work and in life – as well as how to get it spectacularly wrong. So, Jim, as everyone is probably saying, thank you.

Christian Broughton, managing director and former editor, The Independent

We've all had bad managers. Some of them horrible. We've all had good managers. Some of them we love as if they were family. (And honestly we might prefer them.) But what truly separates the good from the bad, the beloved from the atrocious? Never has a book answered that very question — until now. With his signature wisdom and wit, Jim Edwards has created the ultimate instruction manual for how to manage, lead, and inspire a team — and how not to fuck it up along the way. This is officially now required reading for all current or aspiring bosses.

Kathryn Tuggle, editor-in-chief of HerMoney and co-author of "How To Money”

Say Thank You For Everything is a deeply entertaining and educational look at leadership. The anecdotes gleaned from Edwards's 30-year career in media will make you laugh and gasp in horror, but at its heart this is a book about breaking the cycle of bad leadership. It's also an antidote to the ‘cult of personality’ model of being a boss; out with eccentric buffoonery, in with tangible takeaways to make you and your team better.

Charlotte Owen, editor-in-chief, Bustle

One of the big problems with leadership is that it’s never taught. You do well as a contributor and then, if you’re really good, you get promoted—as Jim did—to the confounding, uncomfortable and totally unfamiliar role of managing people. For those of us who’ve had that experience or ever hope to, Say Thank You for Everything is the manual we’ve been looking for. It’s honest, approachable, free of jargon and full of practical advice. As I read it, I kept nodding in recognition. Jim knows how the leadership game is played and, better yet, he knows how to coach his readers to play it as well.

Eric Schurenberg, CEO Mansueto Ventures and former editor-in-chief of Inc. magazine

From the Publisher