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Too many managers concentrate on and are rewarded for achieving short‐term goals. These do matter but so do long‐term more abstract goals; training must take this into account.

Argues that real delegation and empowerment are skills which have to be learned. In the present turbulent environment, managers have to learn to push decision making downwards, say “no” to the unreasonable demands of colleagues and their boss and spend less time on trivial, day‐to‐day tasks which can be performed by others and concentrate on long‐term priorities. Distinguishes between delegating work and delegating responsibility and suggests how successful empowerment can be achieved.

“If you want something done, give it to a busy manager.” How do some people pack more productive hours into the day than others?

Goal setting as a process is a little like participative management — most managers believe in it, but few practise it. Though the work of researchers like Locke has shown fairly conclusively that people who set specific goals achieve more than those who do not, there has not been any significant translation of the findings into practice[1]. More popular works like The One Minute Manager, in attempting to bridge the gap between theory and practice, may have over‐simplified the process of goal setting.

In a recent survey of managers (conducted at the Irish Management Institute, Dublin, early 1983) more than 80 per cent considered time as a problem for them. Although time is the one resource available equally to all managers, paradoxically, it is a resource that causes considerable stress and concern for individual managers. This resource will prove even more difficult for managers in future, for two reasons. Firstly, managers will be working in more complex and uncertain conditions. As a result they will have more complicated choices to make between alternative uses of their time. It is this pressure of choice that makes the skill of self‐management such a difficult one to master. Secondly, the increasing size and sophistication of organisations raises critical issues for managing time. While trying to satisfy the needs of their own jobs, managers are increasingly open to demands from others. While some organisations are being redesigned to cope with these new dependencies, e.g., matrix management, the burden of managing his own boundaries and time still rests on the individual manager.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Leadership & Organization Development Journal is split into four sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Culture, Change and Intervention; Management Styles and Techniques; Leadership and Decision; Communications.