Books
I'm Sorry I Broke Your Company
Karen Phelan is sorry. She really is. She tried to do business by the numbers—the management consultant way—developing measures, optimizing processes, and quantifying performance. The only problem is that businesses are run by people. And people can’t be plugged into formulas or summed up in scorecards.
Phelan dissects a whole range of consulting treatments for unhealthy companies and shows why they’re essentially fad diets: superficial would-be fixes that don’t result in lasting improvements and can cause serious damage. With a mix of cleared-eyed business analysis, heart-wrenching stories, and hard-won lessons for both consultants and the people who hire them, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore. Karen Phelan and other consultants may have “broken” your company, but she’s eager to make amends.
Reviews
Multiple press reviews
Publisher's Weekly
“Former Fortune 100 executive Phelan skewers the mystique of management consultants in this entertaining guide for how not to manage a business. Drawing on her own consulting experiences, she portrays them as providing pre-packaged, unproven theoretical constructs that “substitute for getting people to work together better.””
The Dallas Morning News
“Using tragicomic examples drawn from her experience at a consulting firm, Karen Phelan shows how fad-of-the-day “best practices” can translate into C-level management malpractice, not in-the-trenches results.”
Edgar H. Schein
“Karen reminds us, It’s the people stupid! and then shows us in this wonderful book how the recommendations of the commercial consultants are basically just ways of keeping the consulting industry profitable. The best thing about this book is the concrete examples, not just the critique.
Business World Review
“I highly recommend the iconoclastic and people oriented book to any organizational leaders, decision makers, managers, and consultants who are seeking an approach to finding workable, realistic, and lasting solutions to the most pressing problems within the firm. The author shares timeless and empowering ideas that will engage and inspire the employees, and avoid the latest fads and acronyms at the same time.
Who Moved My Holy Hand Grenade?
Who Moved My Holy Hand Grenade is a humorous journey that covers everything you need to know about business from management fundamentals, like corporate culture and competitive strategy, to real-life skills, like how to suck up properly. Using Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail as an analogy for the pursuit of corporate success, readers will learn about such mythical creatures as the ideal leader, the break-through strategy, and the perfect plan. But this isn’t just any version of Arthurian legend, it’s the Monty Python retelling! So it’s chock full of phony models, mock quizzes, cartoons, and fake vocabulary because, to be honest, most business books are dreadfully dull, and this one isn’t!
Beware, though, this handbook isn’t just a primer or a parody, it draws from the current thinking in science and economics to challenge some conventional management practices. Funny and sarcastic, yet pragmatic and intelligent, this book is for people who want to succeed in business without losing their sanity or their sense of humor.