Two Words, One Answer.
only thing
 The Only Really Thing $13.98 Canada's New Wave Rock Pop band Spiral Beach, with their all new studio album featuring first single "Domino" - think B-52's 2009 style! Fresh from wowing them at NXNE, look for the band that takes live concerts to a whole new level at a city near you!  Profits Aren't Everything, They're the Only Thing: No-Nonsense Rules from the Ultimate Contrarian and Small Business Guru $24.99 Someone had to write this book. I suppose all this talk about Employee Engagement, stakeholders, and purpose driven workforce was going to drive someone to write a book with very much the contrarian view of these things. This is that book. Unfortunately, contrarian does not mean correct. There are a lot of ways you can examine this author's premises and find large, gaping holes. Micromanagement is one. The problem with micromanagement is that any organization of significance - with more than a couple dozen people, is going to have more moving parts than one person can possibly manage, much less micromanage. The model simply does not scale, and this author does not offer anything about when the micromanagement model is to be retired. A second obvious place you attack is the premise that creating a strict, rule bound, Taylorian workforce is a foolproof path to profits. The evidence is pretty well in that such a model does not work. It is bad for large organizations like GM, and worse for smaller organizations that require innovation and creativity - things that do not emerge in tight, rule bound environments, to create breakthroughs that make a small business have any chance for alpha vis-a-vis his competitors. Lastly, the advice about paying vendors late - well, that might be a good survival strategy, but when you pay vendors late, they often take notice. Any effort your vendor might have taken to go "above and beyond" the call is going to go away when vendors start prioritizing that effort by how late their receivables are. The things that make an organization great, extra effort at the margins - simply dont happen in the environment of fear that this author openly promotes. The book is a great manual on how to become a petit tyrant who owns an enterprise of maybe a dozen people, who never does anything but work. Frankly, as much as I would never want to be a worker in this model, I would want to be a boss even less. When you are on your deathbed, you don't go "man, I wish I spent more time at the office managing my workforce by fear". There are a couple good points, which merited adding a star. Golf is a colossal waste of time - especially for CEOs. Hiring family is also an idiotic idea. Those chapters are patently good advice that, sadly, are buried under a lot of other quite horrible advice. That all said, there is a market for telling the Petit Tyrants of the world what they want to hear (no wonder this guy proudly consults for the nations "Council of Mayors"). If anything, such a book is a nice one to sit on the bookshelf next to all the "Management by Donald Trump" books the author is seeking to compete with. |
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