Book Review How Did That Happen by Roger Connors and Tom Smith 2009 - Coursework Example

Something we go to when we are very close to pulling all our hair out from sheer frustration. Summary In most cases, we just need a surefire way to fix our problem, something that will guide us to the step of recovery, to save us from what has gone incredibly wrong and probably made us lose more than just our money. In such situations, more than the financial losses, we are worried about the amount of time, effort and energy we had put into the project. More often than not, we stress over our projects and spend sleepless nights wondering if our plan will be accepted by our targets and if we would achieve the success we had set out to.

And when our project fails even a little bit, we can all but hang our heads in shame and disappointment. In How did that happen Roger Connors and Tom Smith address such situations. In the scene of the global economic crisis and where it was born, all managers have at some point or the other asked how all their plans went awry and how everything they had done was washed down the drain. But it’s not often that one can get answers to such questions. For one, the answer to every how did that happen is completely different.

And another, no one will take the onus to explain to you what went wrong when you executed a particular plan. It is almost always up to you, the designer of the plan, to figure out what went wrong in your master plan, and where. In this day and age, we have the option to outsource our problems to consultants. They do an in-depth study of our plans and arrive at what went wrong and give us suggestions on how to rectify it. “Successfully holding others accountable to deliver on expectations, and doing it in a way that make others feel good about it, requires real effort and skill.

” (Connors & Smith, 2009, pg.15-16). In spite of this, organizations may find it quite embarrassing to hand over their failures to random strangers. It makes the most sense to find the loopholes in the plan we have worked so hard on. Review They say prevention is better than cure. But when the disease strikes, we cannot sob over not having taken the prevention. It is time for action. However, in most cases, when such crises strike, we have no clue where to begin to clean up the mess. We know that we have to do something to save our company from drowning, to keep ourselves afloat, but when disaster strikes, we lose our cool in all the panic.

We need guidance, someone to tell us exactly what to do, when to do and how to do it. The only problem is, no one ever wants to take the responsibility to be that someone, probably out of fear of flopping out again. This is when smart people decided to write about foreseen crises when they were in a sober state of mind, so that when the problem showed its ugly face, people would have somewhere to turn to - a guide, a direction to move in to rectify what has gone horribly wrong. In How did that happen, Connors and Smith have defined in a very simple and comprehensible manner what one must do in case of such outbreaks.

Rather than giving us vague illustrations and long, complex instructions that no one will understand and confusing us even more, they have managed to break down the whole concept and give us step-by-step instructions that are definite, as opposed to the ambiguity one usually finds in such books. This may be the most important factor of this book, that even in spite of being a self-help book, it actually