Mismanagement Manual: The Executive's Guide to standing in your own Way

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

Every organisation has a Best Practice for getting in its own way. This is the field guide.

The Mismanagement Manual is a dry, observational tour through the rituals corporate life performs in place of actually working: the all-staff email that achieves communication without communicating anything, the vision statement that absorbs scrutiny while reflecting none of it back, the strategy deck whose follow-up meeting produces a follow-up document that requires a follow-up meeting. The workshop that changed nothing. The rebrand that solved a different problem. The reorganisation announced with admirable conviction and no measurable destination.

Across thirty-four chapters and eight sections — Communication, People, Leadership, Tools, the Performance of Change, Remote Work, the Grand Strategies, and Advanced Techniques — Denis Franz catalogues the patterns that recur regardless of industry, headcount, or quarter. The book names the principle that underwrites them all: the Clarity Cost, the price an organisation pays for being precise. It is, as the editors put it, the most predictable expense in corporate life, and the most consistently declined.

The Mismanagement Manual may be listened to from beginning to end, in which case it functions as a taxonomy. It may also be consulted selectively, in which case it functions as a reference — start with the chapter that describes your current situation, then work outward to understand how you arrived there.

The patterns are not predictive. They are descriptive. By the time you recognise them, they have usually already occurred.

Recognition is the first step. The second step is the topic of a different book.