Business Summaries - Ignited By Vince Thompson

The Big Idea
Ignited addresses the issues of the real-world mid-level managers stuck between the needs of the corporation, the team, the colleagues, and the customers. The book highlights three important values for any manager and shows how you can attain them: more power, more purpose and more success.

By focusing on these three values, the book promises to teach how to:

Lead in a limited space
Know your network enough to expand it and your influence
Manage time, powerlessness and negativity in the workplace and outside
Implement strategic change in your company and industry
Help you achieve your purpose
Accomplish goals you’re uniquely positioned to achieve
Master new roles in the center of your organization
Connect your personal passions with the goals of the company
Sell your vision and the projects you feel most passionate about
Live your best life, not just the company’s

Why You Need This Book
Ignited talks about the important forces that exert pressure on the mid-level manager, and the strategies one needs to learn in order to reshape one’s career and organization. The book does not look at success at the very top like most books, but defines success in the middle and shows that life there can just be as fulfilling and rewarding. By looking at the nuances of numerous roles in the workplace, Thompson demonstrates how managers can create the future and affect change to the people around them, putting back the heart and soul in the workplace. It gives managers in the middle real tools to make the most out of not just the workspace, but in their personal lives as well.

Living in Quake Country
Today’s managers no longer live on safe, high ground. Instead, they live in “Quake Country,” a place made volatile by technology, competition, innovation and constant social change. It is a place of uncertainty where people are dissatisfied with a lot of things: their personal goals do not align themselves with that of the company, turnover rates are high and fulfillment is difficult to gauge given how volatile circumstances in the workplace are. We all know there is much discontentment, and that essentially impresses a chaotic image of the modern-day workplace.

The book addresses the dilemma of today’s manager who seems to be stuck in the middle. It convinces managers to seek new opportunities not only in prospective jobs and projects but also in their current work as it points out a number of reasons to stay put and look at a number of opportunities often missed by the chaos visible from the manager’s perspective. Here are a few of those opportunities:

Demographic change as many top-level execs retire and vacancies will have to be filled out.

Increasing complexity of business should pose a challenge for managers to command aspects of their operations in which their skills play an important purpose.

Growing corporate flexibility has allowed for the destabilization of a hierarchical corporate structure, allowing middle managers to be recognized and valued for their specific contributions.

All these point to the reinvention of the corporate environment as old model managers have become obsolete.

Base Camp: The Ignited Quiz
The ‘Ignited Quiz’ is a survey-type questionnaire with ten questions. It is used as a tool to determine one’s strengths as a manager to help you make the most out of this book. These questions can be simplified into the following categories:

Relational: How well do you know your colleagues? Who are the colleagues you rely on? Who are your mentors?

Attitudinal: Are you confident that your company’s goals are aligned with your team’s performance? How good are you as a motivator?

Behavioral: Do you have a personal system to make the most out of your time?

Managers with strong, sound practices will find themselves benefiting from the book by reinforcing their existing strengths. Weaker managers will find the lessons in the book valuable in improving their performance.

Part 1: Get More Power
This part offers basic tools for improving the attitudes and manner of thinking of managers in the middle. Those who have done well in the Ignited Quiz will find a lot of these principles to affirm and reinforce many of the practices they have, highlighting significant attitudinal and behavioral patterns that have been encountered in successful undertakings previously. These tools are summarized under the principles discussed below.

Action With Traction
Thompson defines action as productivity in work and traction as when efforts in the workplace make a genuine, measurable and lasting difference. For most work environments, action is often achieved through an impetus: when deadlines need to be met, when a demand has been made, when a sense of urgency needs to be responded to.

While we often give credit to our ability to rise to the occasion or to engage in action whenever necessary, it is much more important to give importance to achieving constant traction as the ultimate goal. Traction cuts deeper with every move, and allows us to carry momentum into the future. By doing so, success will be guaranteed even when there are no demands for it.

Increasing traction can be achieved in the following steps:

Achieve complete alignment between upper management’s expectations of you and what you believe you should do. While the boss may tell you to do certain activities on a whim, it helps to examine the implicit needs of the company and to work on these implicit needs.

Consider the concept of ‘Management Value Added’ over the popular concept of ‘Time Management’. By asking: “What value does management add?” Answering this question will expose very specific expectations that upper management have of you.

Build a portfolio of projects that stick, rather than slip. Driving the company forward means being able to identify those activities that promote gaps within the company and those projects that propel the company forward. We constantly do things without necessarily examining the consequences they bring upon us.

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