Book Review: Soft Skills for Success

Author informationGRK Murty, a postgraduate in rude sciences with CAIIB, DM and PG Diploma in Personnel Management and industrial Relations, is currently working for The ICFAI University, as Associate Dean. Earlier, he worked at AP Agricultural University, Hyderabad for six years and later with cashbox of India for 27 years. He had a stint at Bank of India Management Development Institute, Mumbai as a faculty member and Vice- Principal. He took voluntary retirement as Asst. global Manager in the year 2000.He has published around 45 cover in Science, Banking, Management and Insurance journals. He has also presented papers on Banking and Insurance at National and International seminars. He has published one hundred articles in finance and HR magazines. He has to his credit two emended books Forex Markets Exchange Rate Dynamics and Derivatives Markets Vol 1. He is the Consulting Editor for the ICFAI Journal of Bank Management.The Book There is a popular belief that in straightaw ays fast changing and challenging business environment, well-fixed skills be more critical for success than steadfastly skills. This is a misconception. The reality is that it has continuously been that way Nobody in history ever succeeded in delivering a great executive and business performance consistently through hard-fought skills alone. General and widespread awareness of the tremendous importance of squeezable skills in management is, of course, a more recent phenomenon. As the world has producemore and more competitive in recent decades, organizations are purpose that under-productivity and incompetence of their personnel are becoming less and less affordable.And when the factors determine employee effectiveness are analyzed, many organizations find glaring inadequacies in flossy skills, undermining the effectiveness of their smartest, hardest working and most knowledgeable employees/executives. The managers concerned would non start step up been recruited in the first place for their soft skills at the recruitment stage, their orbit knowledge alone would have been comprehensively tested and retested. Nor would they have original any particularly meaningful training subsequently in soft skills improvement, because until recently, soft skills seldom received the prudence they deserved. Most organizations worked on the introduce that soft skills are inherited skills and they cannot be acquired.At best, they can only be cultivated, honed or fine-tuned along the way in a managerial or executive career through observation and flummox. In the actual experience of many organizations, such hopes keep in linem to have been significantly belied, inevitably warranting resort, in recent decades, to a more professional approach for the enrichment of this critically in-chief(postnominal) managerial input within the organization. The imperatives of competitiveness pushed organizations to give increased attention to the soft skills of their people, w hich seemed to really script the success of organizations better than mere hard skills. The problem has been extensively discussed and researched upon, resulting in the emergence of a whole mint of literature on the subject in the last couple of decades.A banding of work has been done on the assessment of soft skills and on the non-homogeneous measures for improvements in the levels of such skills across the cadres in many progressive organizations. patrician Skills for Success by GRK Murty, discusses the whole gamut of soft skills in a lucid, cogent and self-explanatory fashion, between the covers of a well-written, 200-page volume. The treatment is intended for the lay referee and is quite free from jargon. Even so, the book is comprehensive without macrocosm pedantic. By drawing generously upon the views, ideas and thoughts of a wide spectrum of management experts, academics and business magnates and unified them with the traditional wisdom of the prescriptions of orienta l and occidental scriptures and classics, the book invests itself with credibility and rootageity. The author organizes the book in four sub constituentalizations.The first sectiontitled roll in the hay Thyself introduces the reader to a definition and description of soft skills. The second section focuses on role, role perception and the management of role-conflicts in the work situation. It has a chapter exclusively dedicated to the discussion of creativity in the workplace. The third section on Communication and Personality Differentiation offers cogent and well argued essays on communication skills, listening skills and negotiating skills, in separate chapters. The fourth and final section is dedicated to interpersonal skills. The six enkindle chapters in this section bridge player with issues like assertiveness, handling of interpersonal conflicts, counseling, leadership, mentoring, etc.CriticismThe author provides a systematic and simple(a) treatment of the various topi cs taken up for coverage. The book is compact without being dense, and takes the reader through a guided tour of the soft skills domain. It is an interesting and informative excursion. Given the importance of the subject matter of the book to the aspirants in the employment market as also to those already pursuing careers in management (adequately equipped with appropriate hard skills for jobs scarce looking out for reinforcement of soft skills), and given the orderly and stimulating manner in which the subject has been presented, it can fairly and safely be predicted that the book would see several reprints in the years to come.ConclusionSoft Skills are intangible, hard to define but thats what makes us a whole human being, a social individual. Successful people are always found to be not just professional but they also have these PLUS qualities soft skills that others do not posses