Management Research

Get UK managers reading and rating your articles

Want to show your research has impact? If you're an academic affiliated to a UK University, this scheme could be just the thing:

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) is calling for entries to the Management Articles of the Year competition, which showcases the best research articles written for a practitioner audience. Working in collaboration with the British Academy of Management, the Association of Business Schools, and the British Library, this innovative initiative is sponsored by the publisher Wiley. It is open to academics affiliated to a UK University, and free of charge. The closing date is 17 May 2013.

The winners will be recognised at an Awards Evening at the British Library in January 2014, published by the CMI in a special collation of winning articles (read it here on the MBS Portal) and featured in Professional Manager magazine (readership 138,000).

To find out more about how you can enter go to www.managers.org.uk/toparticles or email piers.cain@managers.org.uk

CMI Management Book of the Year 2013 winners

The 2013 CMI Management Book of the Year was announced at an awards ceremony at the British Library on Monday 28 January in front of an audience of 200 managers, leaders, authors and publishers. The top prize of £5,000 was awarded to Richard Newton for his book The Management Book: How to manage your team to deliver outstanding results.

The competition is judged by a panel of business leaders including Sir Anthony Cleaver, former chief executive and chairman of IBM. He explained why Richard’s book stood out:

“Last year Oxford University Press chose the word ‘omnishambles’ – a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged – as their word of 2012; suggesting something has gone seriously wrong with the UK’s management skills.It is now 43 years since I first became a manager but I can still remember the anxiety of constantly encountering new situations. In this economic environment, managers need to be more skilled than ever before. We can no longer afford the luxury of learning on the job and Richard’s book provides the perfect guide for anyone, regardless of seniority or experience, to consider the essential people management skills required to become a successful leader."

“It is the kind of book that I wish I had had access to when I was starting my career – it would certainly have saved me a lot of time and trouble!”

The other Management Book of the Year category winners are:

Management & Leadership Textbook category

Managing Equality and Diversity: Theory and practice by Savita Kumra and Simonetta Manfredi. Published by Oxford University Press.

 

Innovation & Entrepreneurship category

Winning at Innovation: The A-F model by Fernando Trías de Bes and Philip Kotler. Published by Palgrave Macmillan.

 

The New Manager category

The Leadership Skills Handbook by Jo Owen. Published by Kogan Page.

 

The Commuter’s Read category

The Strategy Book by Max McKeown. Published by Pearson.

Find out more about the awards and the winners.

Management and Consulting Book Club

There's only three weeks until the winners of the 2013 CMI Management Book of the Year awards are announced here at the British Library. January is traditionally a time to reflect, so you may want to have a look at the shortlisted books for inspiration and practical ideas.

You may also be interested in CMI's Management and Consulting Book Club - which is a website and LinkedIn Group that's free to join. This month they're focusing on books about change, and offering members a chance to win a copy of bestseller The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes & Posner.

Open access: the debate continues

Interesting article and comments in yesterday's Times Higher Education Supplement:

timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=422188&c=1 …

Management Book of the Year 2012 – Judgement Day

As the shortlist for CMI’s Management Book of the Year 2012 is announced, run in association with the British Library, one of our judges - Karen McArthur MCMI - shares her experience of mining for management gold from this year’s contenders: 

Having five books to read in a relatively short timescale is a little daunting, so I always start with the book that I believe will be quickest to get through. It makes me feel good to know that I have got one under my belt early on, and also sets the benchmark by which the others are judged. I travel an hour by train to work and so use this time in the morning to read, but only when I get a seat. Hanging on to the tube strap while wobbling in high heels is not conducive to effective reviewing!

As the deadline date draws closer, I inevitably have to give over a weekend to a mammoth reading session and then it’s a blitz to get the reviews written. I make notes as I go along but always recheck and calibrate once I have read them all – sometimes this means that high scores given to the first books get moderated when they are put in context with the others.  

As ever, the calibre of books entered this year was a mixed bag. Some were a really interesting read and I might have gone out and bought them myself. Some go heavy on the academic references, some more on tools and tips. Every now and then I come across something which is new to me and that’s great – it shows that at every level of management you can still learn something new. Within the box of books, there is almost always a duff read - the sort of book that makes you look at the earlier reviews, scratch your head and ask 'why did this get through?'. If it hasn’t come up to scratch by the halfway mark, I stop reading word-for-word and just do more of a skim read to make sure that there are no hidden nuggets. I guess the lesson for authors here is: grab the reader’s attention early or don’t bother!

The first round of reviews is interesting and we are initially all very polite - we have to trust each other’s judgement and it can be hard to fight the corner for your books versus others that you haven’t read. The second round is always harder as there are potentially more books to read in a shorter timescale and here the process gets more heated as we are all judging the same book. If there isn’t a stand-out winner, there is potential for significant debate at this point. Passions run high, but there has yet to be any bloodshed – who knows, perhaps this will be the first year!

Download the shortlist (PDF). The category and overall winners will be unveiled at the British Library Conference Centre on 28 January 2013.

Win the 25 shortlisted books in Management Book of the Year

Just enter the competition on Twitter run by CMI @cmi_managers How would you like to win all of our shortlisted books and bring some #ManagementGold into your life? #competition

Top management books announced: management gold

This year's 137 entries to the CMI Management Book of the Year, run in association with the British Library, have been whittled down to a shortlist of 25 books - five in each category. The competition aims to identify the nuggets of ‘management gold’ that can make a real difference to managers' day-to-day jobs from among the vast array of management books available, and to recognise the best of UK management writing. As well as quality of ideas, the books have to be readable, accessible, innovative and engaging. Download the shortlist (PDF) - read them all (free) at the British Library St Pancras.

This year's shortlisted books reflect the national focus on how best to stimulate growth during difficult times, with a focus on practical skills and innovation; ways of improving workforce morale and engagement, with values-drivers and integrity as key themes; and the importance of having robust models for decision-making and the need to apply techniques more systematically.

The shortlisted books will now undergo an intense reviewing process by the judges, who are all leading business figures or academic experts. The category and overall winners will be unveiled at the British Library Conference Centre on 28 January 2013.

Keep up to date with the entries, top management tips and expert advice from judges and authors by searching #ManagementGold on Twitter. Or see www.managementbookoftheyear.org.uk for information about the judges, entries and how to enter next year.

Best management books shortlist to be decided today

The judging session to agree the shortlist of the five best books in each category of the CMI Management Book of the Year competition takes place today here at the British Library. I'm looking forward to welcoming the judges and to announcing the shortlist on 22 October, with our colleagues from Chartered Management Institute. The Management Book of the Year competition recognises the best quality management books, helping busy managers identify the books most worth reading, and rewarding the most important and practical management writing. The author of the overall winner will receive a cheque for £5,000 at an awards evening to be held on 28 January at the British Library Conference Centre.

Management Book of the Year competition - why the British Library is involved

The Management Book of the Year competition, which is now in its third year, was created in 2010 to uncover the UK’s best books on management and leadership and raise the profile of the great management writing published in the UK. It is run by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) in association with the British Library.

The British Library has been involved right from the start because we recognise the role that good quality books can have in helping individuals and businesses innovate and succeed, and the great quality of UK publishing in this subject. The competition also fits very well with the content and services the British Library offers to entrepreneurs, inventors and small business via our Business and IP Centre, and to everyone interested in management research via our Management and Business Studies Portal which provides free online access to the British Library’s vast print and digital collections. CMI members benefit from a specialist information service.

We’ve received over 130 entries across our five categories: Practical Manager, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Best Commuter’s Read, the New Manager, and Management and Leadership Textbook.

Judging is now underway and a shortlist of 25 titles will be announced on 22 October. The category and overall winners will be revealed at the awards evening at the British Library Conference Centre on 28 January 2013.

Key Note market research summaries now available free to all our users

We know from talking to our users that market research information is something both researchers and businesspeople want - so we've entered into a pilot arrangement with Key Note, a leading publisher of UK market intelligence across a wide range of industries and consumer markets, to make their executive summaries available on the MBS Portal free of charge.

Key Note reports combine primary research with data from nationally recognised sources.Using the executive summaries and the accompanying table of contents now available on the MBS Portal, you can read, print or download the key findings and outputs of each report, free of charge. Over 250 Key Note executive summaries can be found in the Marketing subject-area - browse them now. Please note that we have published the executive summaries, not the full reports. If you want to read any of the full-length reports in detail you can:

• Read them for free in the British Library Business and IP Centre at St Pancras, London. The staff there will be happy to help you find the report(s) you need. You will need a British Library Reader Pass.
• If you can’t visit the Business and IP Centre in person and don’t have access to Key Note reports through an academic or public library, you can purchase full reports, or selected chapters from the reports, direct from Key Note at a discounted price. You will find details at the bottom of the MBS Portal page that contains the executive summary PDF.

The executive summaries are made available to MBS Portal users as part of a pilot arrangement between the British Library and Key Note Ltd. No recommendation of this content over that provided by other publishers is implied by the arrangement.

We've also published an article about the wider collection of market research reports and databases available from the British Library.