You Can’t Manage By-the-Numbers!

You’ve seen all of the Be-A-Better-Company froth: Step 1: Reduce costs, eliminate waste; Step 2: Figure out where you’re not doing your best; Step 3: Get better in those places. Sure. Let’s state the obvious in shallow aphorisms–along the lines of Bob Fulghum’s “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” It’s an entertaining and mildly thought-provoking method, but does it really accomplish anything? Let’s take more of a Rubber-Meets-the-Road technique! For instance, how can you: Deal with a customer who is profoundly unhappy? Deal with a distributor who wants impossibly deep discounts? Handle employees who are disinterested or marginal performers? Get Nationwide Advertising and Recognition without spending a buck? Put performers, not actors, in positions where they can excel? Etc. etc. This book is decidedly NOT a cookbook for making a “Successful Business” cake, or a stale methodology that, if followed, will always give success! Rather it is a tutorial in examining your situation in new ways and using the same old available resources in novel and innovative ways to SOLVE YOUR BUSINESS PROBLEMs (which are always the same old problems!).