What Makes For A Good Manager?

Matthew Steward has written an entertaining book entitled The Management Myth: Why Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (2009). Mr. Steward covers topics such as strategic planning, management science, and international business while employed as a top management consultant.

At the closing of the book, Steward provides a brief and insightful view of what makes a good manager - "A good manager is someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the big thing that really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is always dissatisfied with pat answers and conventional wisdom, and who therefore takes a certain pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world and an even better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things that make up character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good manager is nothing more or less that a good and well-educated person."