Getting Things Done When You Are Not in Charge

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You are not in charge and you want to make a difference: that is the dilemma. You may not know who is in charge in today's changing, temporary, and virtual organizations, but you know you are not! You are searching for ways to contribute through the work you do and gain some personal satisfaction in the process. This book can help you do just that.

In this new edition of his classic book, Geoff Bellman shows readers how to make things happen in any organization regardless of their formal position. The new edition has been written for a wider audience, including people in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, paid and volunteer workers, managers and individual contributors, contract and freelance workers. More than seventy percent of the material is brand new, including new examples, new chapters, new exercises, and much more.

176 pages, Paperback

First published August 31,1992

About the author

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Geoffrey M. Bellman spent the first fourteen years of his career on the inside of three Fortune 500 companies (Ideal Basic Industries, AMOCO Corporation, and G.D. Searle). Now, as an organizational consultant, he works with corporations on the effective use of human talent as they undertake major change. In this capacity, he has worked with more than 100 corporations, including GTE, TRW, and Shell Oil.
He is the author of Getting Things Done When You Are Not in Charge, Your Signature Path, The Consultants' Calling, and The Quest for Staff Leadership, which won the National Book Award of the Society for Human Resource Management.


Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 17 votes)
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17 reviews All reviews
April 1,2025
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Practical and helpful to anyone who inhabits and works in large organizations inside and outside of work. Be prepared for practical advice that you can use right now but also many challenging questions about you, your organization, and the specific strategies that you are using -- or not -- to accomplish your goals. It took me along time to read this book because so often I had to stop and think, or do an exercise, or try something new at work the next day. Afterwards I bought several copies for my staff and colleagues, who were energized hearing me talk about some of the breakthroughs I had achieved using some of the wisdom in these pages.
April 1,2025
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His ideas are good, but they can be summarised into few pages. He writes about himself too much.
April 1,2025
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Not a fan.

This book compares career to a game, which I can’t get with. The model it recommends to help solve tense work situations might be useful, if you struggle to see past your own problems to those of others and the organization at large. The suggestions it has are fairly intuitive, I think. Generally, this read was not a good use of my time.
April 1,2025
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Skip this book, and read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done.
April 1,2025
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I have found this book helpful because even when I was "in charge" of a program, I had an ED or board or some other group I needed to answer to. It helped me to learn to manage up and sideways. There's a wonderful passage in this book about "The Game of Life" that's worth the cost.
April 1,2025
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I'm not going to say that this book didn't help make me think about some things, but the overall point of the book is "fall in line with how things are done in order to help other people so they will help you." I just don't share the mindset of this guy.
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