The Sergeant Major Syndrome

About the Book

You were a high-potential individual contributor. Your tech, sales and/or creative skills were valued. You got great performance reviews, a few raises and promotion into management…then things soured. The road to the top seemed to become a glass ceiling. Others began to pass you by. You began to worry about your job security. What happened?

You are not alone. Millions of Sergeant Majors like you struggle to understand why their good efforts don’t lead to equally good outcomes. The Sergeant Major Syndrome can help you to both understand and deal with these dynamics. Written by a former organizational sergeant major and a manager of sergeant majors, this book is both a diagnostic tool and a plan of action.

About the Author

Roy Jacques (MBA, PhD) can tell the story of the Sergeant Major from a first-person perspective, having been raised in a blue collar community and subsequently spending thirty years learning the central insights of this book. He is also a respected academic author of more than a hundred scholarly books, book chapters, articles and presentations. His previous book, Manufacturing the Employee (London:Sage, 1996) has been praised by Gary Hamel, one of the world’s preeminent management consultants, as having, “helped me to better understand how our management orthodoxies came to be, and how they might be overturned.” Roy is also a successful entrepreneur, having founded, operated and successfully sold Ravenheart of Sedona, a coffee shop group in Arizona which he returned to, refurbished and profitably sold a second time in 2010. Clients with whom Roy has consulted include AT&T, General Electric, Tandem computer, as well as several New Zealand tertiary and biotechnology organizations.

Mary Hobson, Director of eResearch SA in Canberra, Australia, manages three dozen sergeant majors. Her career in the management of high-tech innovation began in her home country of England in 1973, where she worked as a programmer for the Royal Air Force before co-founding the software house, Napier Computing Services. Shortly before the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mary became the head of an international joint venture in Russia which counted as clients GEC Plessey, Ericcson, and Intel.