I taught college English for ten years before I found myself in my first management position: setting up and then running an in-house textbook publishing division at the technical college where I worked. At first, sitting all alone in a grubby storage room at the back of the school’s culinary arts building, I desperately tried to figure out what the hell I was doing. But, over time, a small success here led to a larger success there as we established a solid track record, and one day several years later, I found myself supervising a slew of employees, freelancers, and interns.
The hardest part was not figuring out the book publishing industry. After all, there are plenty of resources to help explain that. The hardest part was not the process of shepherding projects from acquisition through production to marketing and sales. Find a good workflow analysis book, and you can figure it out.
No, the hardest thing was managing all the people who had to work together, each person doing their own parts at exactly the right times.
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Mark Roy Long 