Most managers learn next-to-nothing and change little over the course of years. You can become a top manager if you can make yourself into a learning manager.

Despite the fact that success at work can be directly, positively impacted by reading the wealth of books that are available on the topic, most people never read those books. Books on audio CD are usually available from most training departments in most companies, and there they sit gathering dust. There are sites out there with podcasts about management, project management, computer skills, efficiency using popular office software, and yet people continue to ignore them.

Do they think that they know everything there is to know about how to do their jobs better? Do they think that they know just enough to get by, and they do not care to do any better? What is it that causes us to ignore the massive media campaign for us to become superior employees and excellent managers.

As for myself, I went through an MBA program. It took me five years. It required about 20 hours per week of my time from January 1996 until June 2000 for me to complete my degree. Did I think that I knew everything about business when I was finished with that degree eight years ago. Apparently, I had some sort of epiphany at some point, becuase I started asking these questions six years after I finished my MBA, realizing that studying finance, accounting, operations management, marketing, statistics, and computer science had taught me next to nothing about how to relate to people or control work done by others instead of myself.

But it cannot be MBA arrogance that causes this lack of learning. It must be something else. I know plenty of people who are not MBA’s and who never went to business school who muddle through and never read a book on management.

Whatever the reason, my experience tells me, and others’ seems to jibe with this, that most managers and workers out there do not read about working or managing. Thus, there is massive competitive advantage in reading about these topics, and even more benefit if you study the topics rather than just reading about them.

Most management books can be polished off in a week without much trouble. If you set yourself a goal of reading one per month, you would hardly strain to accomplish this, and yet you would be far, far ahead of your coworkers at the end of the year in a way that going back to school would never produce, and your investment in such reading would be tiny by comparison.

Yet many, many people go back to school to enhance their careers, and we all work around them and know them, and when they are done, the difference in their careers is… nothing. No raise. No job change. The only thing that changes is that their degree is now listed on a resume that they do not use to job shop.

Here’s another funny anecdote. Going through the MBA program, I made many friends. Keeping in touch with them, of the 30 or so of us, I am the only one that I know of who has been promoted in the last 8 years. The others are all doing the same jobs they were the day they graduated - working at the same level for basically the same pay. I was on the same path until I started reading about management instead of economics.

The unfortunate truth is that colleges and universities have no idea what to teach at business school. They teach academic subjects that they can turn into research and science that they can sell via consulting to big business. But they don’t turn out managers. MBA programs focus on number-based disciplines. And in the one class on actual management, no “how to manage” course is presented. Rather, a history of various archaic and outdated management philosophies is presented with little detail.

Where is the how-to for managers? It’s in the books on bookstore shelves. It is not in the textbooks. It is not in the classrooms. And many of these books are available at libraries, junk stores, and used on Amazon.com for an absurdly low cost. None of them have math in them. They are all soft-skills.

As discussed in the principle of relationships, soft-skills are what real success depends on - not hard skills. Hard skills will only get you a starter job or a job as a consultant.

Build yourself using the inexpensive habit of reading, listening to auido CDs, listening to podcasts, and accomplish real progress during the year. Don’t tell yourself you don’t have time. Every time you turn on the TV, that is time you had that you chose to waste. Nothing happens on TV that in any way will be relevant to you next year or relevant to anyone around you ever.

Learn to be a better team mate and manager, and you coworkers and employees will have their lives affected positively for a long time to come.