Mining the Middle Ground: Developing Mid-Level Managers for Strategic Change

By David N. Williams

Throughout the late 80s and 90s many companies fell victim to the downsizing trend. Of the companies that downsized by removing middle managers 66% found productivity declined, 49% found profits did not increase, and in 86% morale plummeted. Middle managers often provide your most important link between top management, operating staff, and your customer. Yet this valuable resource is often stereotyped, skipped over, and avoided as deadwood and blockers. Why make this expensive and critical mistake? Mining the Middle Ground: Developing Mid-Level Managers for Strategic Change presents an applied, field-proven model for the roles, responsibilities, and steps necessary to develop, integrate, and mine your middle management resource for strategic change. Founded on a strong theoretical basis, the model has been developed and refined over the past 15 years and implemented in over 100 organizations. Case study examples, success stories, and interview excerpts lend support and explain the various aspects and steps involved in the model. Anecdotal examples and in-depth interview excerpts support and illustrate the concepts and steps involved. Successfully enabled and cultivated, mid-level managers can be your company's strongest resource for knowledge creation, breakthrough thinking, and change leadership-and they are readily available to you. Developing and tapping this resource is an option you cannot continue to ignore. Stop wasting the valuable resource middle management represents based on stereotypes and low expectations. Raise your sights, actively develop and involve them, and you will discover that this group is a vital, unique asset for strategic change. Mining the Middle Ground: Developing Mid-Level Managers for Strategic Change shows you how to make it happen.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1574442953
• ISBN13: 9781574442953
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: CRC Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Mining the middle ground

Very good book for people involved in Process based enterprise. The methodology is thourough and have provided excellent results with complex or elementary processes (wether it is an engineering process or an administrative/transactional process). Team leaders and facilitators should review the document before conducting exercices like Kaizen for processes. We now provide a copy of this book to every leader involved in team based organization. I suggest it to all members.Trust the sequence described in the book.Thanks Mr Williams!Jean-Marc Legentil Principal Associate Bell Nordic Consulting Inc.

A Real World Manifesto

For anyone who has lived through TQM or other management initiatives, here's a book that I found to be practical and grounded in hands-on real world experience. Organizational change is always incredibly difficult, even when implemented "correctly", for example with true top management buyin. The guts of where the initiative is won or lost often if not always resides in middle supervision and management. This book really captured it for me. Understanding and implementation of organizational change has to occur at all levels, and this book speaks to that, from strategic process management to tactical mechanics. This book is a great tool if you are in an organization attempting any broad-scale change. RBB