Management: A Focus on Leaders, 2nd edition

For Principles of Management courses.
Financial crises, catastrophic disasters, and business scandals are constantly making today’s headlines. Annie McKee, author of the textbook Management: A Focus on Leaders, believes that amidst these issues we are experiencing a unique opportunity to add new fervor to the way we prepare students for the future. Directly addressing the challenges and opportunities in our changing world, Management: A Focus on Leaders shows future managers how to lead in a complex, yet exciting, global environment.

Emphasising Leadership. To help students prepare for the unprecedented challenges they will face in today’s business world, the central theme of this text is on leadership, which is deeply embedded into the material from beginning to end. The author's practical approach to leadership is also steeped in the best and most current research, providing students with the most up-to-date information.
Bringing Everything Together–Integrated Approach.
In order to gain a better understanding of management as a whole, topics such as planning, organising, leading, and controlling should be viewed as interconnected ideas. This text encourages students to think about management from a big-picture standpoint, rather than present a series of seemingly unrelated, isolated topics.
Lead Today. This text uses an outcome-driven approach that focuses on how students can immediately apply the knowledge, theories, and concepts they learn in the course to their personal and professional lives.
Tradition Meets NOW–Essential, Current Topics.
Today’s workplace is vastly different than it has been in previous years. In order to better reflect the environment in which students will soon find themselves, this text has incorporated key and current management topics into the material. Examples include: 

• Ethics and the responsible use of power 
• Social, technological, and organisational change
• The need for innovation
• Globalisation
• The power of human diversity
• Leadership at all levels
• Sustainable organisations and communities

Management: A Focus on Leaders has received high marks for writing style, up-to-date content and current events, and high standards around sharing research, theories and models. In this edition, we have taken these to an even higher level of quality. Students will find it easy to read, easy to study, and enjoyable.  The writing style invites them to explore all of the key concepts related to management, while developing their own leadership  skills and learning how to apply concepts to real-world situations.  Faculty will find seminal research–things that all students of management should be exposed to–as well as the most current thinking.   Faculty will also find it easy to help students become educated consumers of knowledge:  treatment of research, models and management practices encourages critical thinking. Both students and faculty will find that the way the book is written and the choice of content brings the study of management into the 21st century. Students and Instructors will both benefit from a variety of new material in the second edition.

 

 Features and content that have been strengthened and added to the second edition include:

• Key current events and their impact on businesses, managers and leaders.
• New Leadership Perspectives that incorporate powerful guidance and wisdom on what it means to lead today’s top organizations and institutions; other Perspectives have been updated based on new interviews, conducted by the author.
• Business Case: Each chapter contains at least one case study about business challenges and leadership.
• New and updated examples of real leaders facing real opportunities challenges in organizations today.
• Visual Models: The author has created three special visual models that support the most important concepts in the text. The first is the integrated model of management and leadership, found at the beginning of each chapter, which shows how the traditional functions of management are actually linked with leadership at the center. Students will also find an icon that reminds them of the importance of social and emotional intelligence, and an icon that depicts human resources’ ever-more-important leadership role in supporting businesses and organizations today.
• Streamlined and updated section in each chapter on how human resources can impact chapter topic areas, as well as how the function can support leadership development and smoothly-running businesses and institutions.
• Streamlined and updated section in each chapter on how all of us can become outstanding ethical leaders.