A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results and Stop Wasting Time.

A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results and Stop Wasting Time. By Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal. Harvard Business School Press, 212 pages. $29.95.

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In the eyes of authors Bruch and Ghoshal, both European professors of management, it's a rare manager who can really focus his or her full attention on the task at hand. Their research, in fact, finds that more than 90 percent of managers procrastinate, detach emotionally and distract themselves with busywork.

It's long been said that great managers, like great generals, know the terrain they're facing and the logistics required to accomplish their goals. But the authors maintain that what really works is when managers engage their own willpower through a combination of energy and focus.

They relate their message through some telling examples, like that of Gerhard Schneider, a middle manager in human resources with Lufthansa AG. Asked to join a task force charged with making key changes designed at turning the airline around, he was told that if he succeeded, he'd probably be so unpopular that he'd have to leave the company. After mulling it over, he concluded that the airline's survival was so important that he had to take that chance.

As it turned out, Schneider did succeed--largely, write Bruch and Ghoshal, because he had a rare combination of high energy and high focus that enabled him "to exhibit a strong sense of personal significance, an ability to thrive in chaos and an ability to step back and reflect." Managers like this aren't simply born, however--they can be taught to focus and "clear their negativity," they write.

A Bias for Action has a strong psychological component, exploring emotions, tendencies and expectations that managers encounter in any workplace. Strong individual examples anchor the book and help universalize its important messages, including a final section offering guidelines for leaders to inspire a bias for action with their own managers.