Rating: 
Summary: Buckingham's First Break All the Rules
Review: The other reviewers have excellently analyzed this book, and I'd like to concentrate here on where the idea of breaking the rules fits into history. In my fields of mathematics and physics teaching and research, history shows that the most creative geniuses broke the rules but also had the most knowledge of the rules. This combination of knowledge and change characterized creative geniuses across the board, from Socrates to Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo and Cervantes and Pierre De Fermat, Beethoven and Mozart and Haydn and Schubert and Chopin, to Paul Dirac and Steven Weinberg and Stephen Hawking and Sir Roger Penrose in physics and beyond. It might be an exaggeration to say that they broke all the rules, but they broke some that nobody had thought of breaking before, and they were prepared to break any that were necessary. They were both rebels and guardians of civilization, a strange combination called the best of human life. That's where breaking all the rules in management comes from, in my opinion.
Rating: 
Summary: Some basic common sense, not much else
Review: There are a few good common sense ideas in this book. For example: 1.It's hard to change people; 2. Make the most of an employee's talents instead of trying to fix their weaknesses; 3. Don't micro-manage; 4. A good way of doing something is not simply the opposite of a bad way. The authors then contend that these ideas go against conventional wisdom. I don't know what conventional wisdom they are talking about since it agrees with most of mine. But then again I went to an engineering school, not a business school. After presenting these ideas there is not much else in the book except a series of disconnected management anecdotes. Curiously most of these anecdotes are examples of bad management. This is in direct contradiction to idea 4 above, which the authors spent several pages discussing. I think the first example of good management was about halfway through the book when they started to talk about Southwest Airlines. (Actually if someone wants to write a good management book, do a case study on Southwest Airlines.) Also most of the examples deal with restaraunts, hotels, and banks with almost none from a high tech or software business. Finally I think (and this is conventional wisdom again) a good manager must be able to 1.Prioritize; 2.Organize. The authors say nothing of these abilities and obviously know little about them.
Rating: 
Summary: Good advice, clearly laid out
Review: I like the way this book is written...it's not a dull analysis of managerial practices. It has many good insights. Perhaps the most important is the manager-employee relationship is the strongest predictor of the employee's ability to thrive and be productive for the company.
Rating:
Summary: Every business person should read this!!
Review: This book has its flaws: it's better at debunking current management theory than suggesting new theories, and I found some sections very repetitious. On the other hand, I think everyone in the business world -- staff as well as management -- should read it.
I've been a working stiff for over 30 years. For many years, at every performance review, I was told that, while I was doing a superb job in my present position, in order to get ahead in the company I'd have to develop management skills. (The unspoken assumption was that if I *didn't* try to develop them, I had no genuine desire for advancement and deserved to be "stuck" at a low-level position and salary for the rest of my career.) So I'd gamely try to develop management skills and fail miserably. The fact is that I have no interest in management, don't enjoy it, and haven't the temperament for it, but I was led to believe that my lack of advancement was "my fault" for "failing" to develop the required skills. I finally became an independent contractor so that I could get paid for doing what I do best and not have to worry about climbing the managerial ladder.
This book was very liberating for me. Its fundamental message is that a great manager accepts each person as an INDIVIDUAL: rather than trying to change the person's inborn character traits and habitual behavior patterns, the manager gives each person the opportunity to reach maximum potential by doing what he/she does best. The authors also point out that most employee "behavior problems" are actually managerial problems: there's a mismatch between the employee and the job, employees feel that their good work is unappreciated or that their job doesn't give them the opportunity to use their talents, and they're constantly being urged to focus on and "overcome" their weaknesses rather than maximize their strengths.
The book doesn't give much detail on how to hire talented people or choose the right person for the job, but I don't think that's the point. Its overall message -- that conventional management wisdom is flat-out WRONG -- is one that needs to be attended to, and they've presented impressive statistical evidence to bolster it. (As a footnote, I eventually became an employee again for practical reasons, but was lucky enough to land at a non-hierarchical, high-tech company that values talent -- and that's made all the difference in the world in my job satisfaction.)
Rating:
Summary: Keep it Simple by Getting Down to Basics !
Review: "First, Let's Break All the Rules" takes alot of wisdom for companies and managers and distills it down to its essence. I read alot of business literature, and I find that just about anyone can make managment difficult, but it takes a really good management book to distill it down and keep it readable. Based on 15 years of Human Resources experience with a large company and multiple degrees in the field, this book hits the mark!Using Gallop Poll information, the concepts of employee motivation and retention are distilled down to 12 questions. The need for good management is tied to business results of productivity, customer satisfaction, profitability, and employee retention. Finally, the overriding importance of the immediate supervisor --versus the company as a whole, the "culture", upper management, etc. -- in these attaining these business results through employee effort and in attracting, retaining and motivating the best performers is demonstrated. We are using this book as the background text for a series of conferences in leadership for our first line supervisors in the field. Glitzy? No. On the mark? Yes, absolutely.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting insights
Review: A good book with some interesting insights and certainly worth reading and worth the price. Would recommend it, though my two strongest recommendations these days--as everyone who knows me will attest--are "Filling the Glass" by Barry Maher and Stepen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." Both are extremely readable particularly Maher's which actually made me laugh out loud while being every bit as instructive as "Break All the Rules."
Rating:
Summary: Interesting data, uninteresting book.
Review: This book has its pros and cons. The cons, unfortunately, outweigh the pros. On the positive side, the Gallup data that Buckingham and Coffman present are intriguing. It is interesting that high-performing business units can be distinguished from those that perform poorly based on employees' responses to certain questions. But the responses of the employees or, more appropriately, their opinions, are not the reason for the good performance. Recognizing this, the authors appropriately move on to describe the management style that makes for good business performance. This, however, is where the book breaks down into an obtuse, vague, and unrealistic personality theory that is justified (as if to impress) with a reference to a study of exorbitant sample size (as if the sample size is what makes for a quality study ... Gallup folks should know better than that). Besides a few reasonable points, the message is essentially that managers should look for "striving", "thinking" or "relating" talents of various kinds (e.g., "relating individualized perception talent") and make sure people who posses those talents are cast in jobs that require such talents. As with most theories of personality, such speculations are of little value and are exceedingly impractical. Assuming for a second that these personality traits do exist, how does that help? First, how do we identify employee's personality traits? The authors pay lip service to this issue (at best, see for example p. 218 and 219), but with the loosely defined personality traits that they invented, how could a tool for identifying those traits be expected. Second, how do we know which jobs require which personality traits? The answers, after reading this book, are not immediately clear. Worse yet, there probably aren't any answers to those questions. Personality theories are not useful tools... especially not for managers. What is clear, however, is that in writing this book the authors extrapolated well beyond the tremendous amounts of data they had. It is commendable that someone is doing research on the ingredients of effective management and that there is some willingness to present those data. The data are of interest. The theory presented in this book, supposedly based on the data, is not.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, worth reading
Review: Please read Robert Morris' review for a good outline of the book's contents. After reading enough of these books, you come to realize that there is no "recipe", no 21 steps, no golden rule and it's good to see the author's point this out. The authors focus on finding peoples' "talents" because this is the thing you canNOT train. It also makes one reflect to really try to understand what our individual talents are. They also point out that most people don't have all the talents and many of the great people, like Walt Disney, have counterparts that complement them and allow individual talents to shine. I agree with the compensation method of having pay ranges that overlap positions. So, for example, a top-notch programmer can make as much or more than a manager. This removes the necessity to promote people to keep them, especially when promoting them could mean putting them in a situation that is not suited to their talents. Overall a good read, pointing out that everybody is an individual and each person needs individual attention and that not all people should be treated the same. You won't find any breakthroughs in this book, but it may change your thoughts on certain beliefs that you may currently have.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting stats--not enough meat
Review: I did not gain significant insight from this book. I did give it three stars because the authors did a thorough job compiling management data; however, they did not derive any substantial conclusions from the data. In addition, the book was tedious to read. The novice manager will not gain "how-to" information, and the experienced manager will not find new thought-provoking management ideas.
Rating:
Summary: interesting
Review: author has a interesting approach worth the time to read
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