This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
You were promoted because you were good at the work. Nobody mentioned that the work had changed.

Now the job is other people, and it is not going well. Work you handed over comes back. A colleague whose judgment you cannot read. A process that fails the same way every month. Meetings that produce discussion and no movement. You are busy, you are responsible, and you are still the reason anything ships.

This is what one practitioner says when a manager asks him what to do on Monday.

Forty-five chapters in five parts: what you actually own, how to choose work and hand it over so it holds, how to keep it moving, how to grow the people doing it, and how to fix the system underneath instead of the same incident twice. Delegation that is not abdication. Metrics you can act on rather than report. Mechanisms instead of good intentions. The development conversation that raises somebody instead of rating them. The difference between a problem and the process that keeps producing it.

Nothing here is theory. Every chapter ends with something to try this week, what to do when it does not go to plan, and the signs that it is working.

It is not the definitive guide to management. It is one practitioner's account of what worked, with the contexts attached, and none of it is the only way.