Michael Tobin

Michael Tobin, OBE, former CEO of leading IT company TelecityGroup, is more likely to throw his team to the sharks (literally) than put them on a training seminar. Controversial, thought-provoking and entertaining, Forget Strategy. Get Results outlines Michael's unconventional approaches to management and shares the lessons hes learned along the way. With TelecityGroups share price up by 1000% over the last ten years, this is a management approach that delivers results. The book will give practical applications for the core characteristics that underpin the philosophy Michaeal applies personally every day, and which he instills in the people who work with him. Michael's ideas inspire not only his management teams but the entire staff to stand, as he puts it, on ungrounded ground. To encourage his teams to break old patterns of thinking, he took them to Scotland to swim with sharks. So they could learn to field tough press enquiries he had staff abducted and interrogated on a trip to Tallinn. When a company merger brought together bitter business rivals he forced the warring parties to share one bed in an ice hotel so the only way they could get through the cold of the night was to huddle together and keep each other warm. The book is divided into 11 areas of management that can really make a difference on delivering results: 1) Fearlessness I learnt early on in my life not to have regrets, to face the future whatever it was going to be, to make tough decisions by getting on and doing it. 2) Freedom I believe people should be given the responsibility to be independent. Freedom comes from responsibility. 3) Flexibility This is the time to ride the wave of change without being dragged under by the weight of old-school thinking. 4) Failure I am not afraid of failure. I am afraid of not being loved. 5) Faith I dont use analytics to make decisions, only my gut feeling and intuition. I use the analytics to monitor my decision along the way. Stats can tell you anything you want to know. 6) Fortune I dont believe in strategy. Its an outmoded concept. I say plan for the vision and never make a decision until the moment you have to. Success is a journey, not a destination. 7) Fortitude I try never to judge other people by my own capabilities because I know my own capabilities have changed over time. 8) Focus This is a pressing business problem: how to manage people with hypertext scatterbrains: to do that you need to create knowledge space around values, articulate those values and your vision, and then rely on people to manage themselves. 9) Fun I completely agree with Napoleon Bonaparte: in victory we deserve champagne; in defeat we need it. 10) Flashpoint Often the problem is that we dont realise something is a problem until it comes and hits us in the back of our head. 11) Future The ground around us is shifting. For some the future is a frightening place. I disagree. I see and relish a future of immense possibility.

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