Chapter 5: Management and Leadership

CHAPTER INTRODUCTION: WISDOM AND SKILLS FOR THE LEARNER

The final chapter in this book contains five activities that focus principally on management and leadership. It also includes a complete beginner's guide to using magic in management and leadership presentations, as well as more PowerPoint slide masters, more pencil-and-paper worksheets, more handouts that make you think, more useful acronyms, and more carefully crafted models.

This chapter begins by going beyond the standard empowerment lessons to an exercise on empowering others as well as yourself and on working together in self-analysis and evaluations of limitations, strengths, and resources. Understanding organizational culture is as big a focus as is personal leadership skill development. A set of eight PowerPoint slides suggests a focus on creating brand image that goes way beyond the typical description of features, emphasizing instead an analysis of associations and human personality characteristics of branding. A clever and creative project management exercise models bad behavior as well as good behavior, and provides guidance in developing the skills needed by managers in setting project objectives, defining roles, checking assumptions, giving and receiving feedback, and getting people to buy into your message.

A complete beginner's guide to performing magic tricks as tools for management and leadership training is a feature of this final chapter. In addition to being a guide to the art and creativity of magic, it is also a guide to the use of magic tricks to model management and leadership principles and concepts. The chapter ”and the book ” concludes with a systematic exercise in creating action plans for changing negative norms into positive ones.