Business success doesn’t come by the book
Not for the first time, an acquaintance asked me to recommend a really good book on how to succeed in business.
Alas, the paucity of wisdom in business books is unmatched in any other field.
Business tomes that make the bestseller list are especially to be avoided. Which means your reading list should not include any of the countless editions in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People franchise.
Business is about relationships. So read Hamlet. Again.
Only a few basic practices are required for success. And the same few mistakes lead to most failures.
As Edna St. Vincent Millay said: “It’s not one damned thing after another. It’s the same damned thing, over and over.” With that in mind: 1. Don’t eat more than you can lift. That is, know your limitations. Don’t kid yourself, we all have them.
2. Always be kind to the boss’s executive assistant. She spends more time with him than you.
3. Never “grind” a supplier. A reliable supplier is worth her weight in gold, so don’t nickel-and-dime her.
4. Bankers and investors hate surprises. Tell them about trouble when it is on the horizon, not on the doorstep. You will be surprised how hard your backers work to help you out of a tight corner.
5. Budget at least 30 per cent more than you plan to spend. Unexpected costs are inevitable.
6. Don’t proceed without a worstcase scenario. What will you do if everything goes wrong? It’s unlikely that you are prepared for a jump in interest rates, a sudden recession, a supply-price spike, the loss of a key employee, an onslaught of rivals and the abrupt collapse of a crucial supplier, all at once.
7. Employees are your indispensable asset. Employees come first, then customers and suppliers, and finally the owner. No business can succeed without high-performance employees.
8. Praise an employee one on one. Then praise her again, later, in front of her peers. 9. Take the blame. 10. Before searching for who made the mistake, look in the mirror. At least some of the fault lies with you.
11. If you want to be tuned out, keep using cant like “We need to think outside the box.”
12. Peter Drucker said management consists of making it difficult for people to do their work. Prove him wrong.
13. You work for your employees. Your job is to remove obstacles from their path, act on their wise suggestions and protect them from people above you who imagine they are thinking outside the box.
14. Visit Italy. In three years, their orange handbags and neckties will be ubiquitous here.
15. Listen more than you talk. Most great ideas come from the shop floor and the sales floor. These include the Big Mac and the pocket computer that put Hewlett-Packard on the map.
16. Do you really know your customers? You only think you do.
17. Never act on impulse. Nothing is what it first appears. The employee neglecting a customer just slashed his ankle on a sharp-edged display case.
18. Some problems fester when not addressed, others go away on their own. Learn the difference.
19. Initiative is vital. But it’s often what you prevent from happening that tells the tale. Historians regard Mackenzie King as our best prime minister. King said his main task was squelching the bad ideas of cabinet colleagues.
20. Only the paranoid survive. Sight unseen, a smart, energetic and determined rival is preparing to put you out of business.
21. The annual employee perfor- mance appraisal is the most demoralizing and destructive practice that business has yet invented.
22. The moment you stop improving, you start failing. The Japanese live by kaizen, continual improvement. Practise it every day.
23. Superb managers don’t wake up one day and resolve to control costs. They’ve been masters of cost control their entire careers. Secondrate managers don’t get religion about cost control until they are flirting with insolvency.
24. Stay in stock. No amount of apology satisfies the inconvenienced customer who leaves empty-handed. Repeat business is your biggest source of revenue, so keep a precise “in-stock” position. 25. Never gossip. Never listen to it. 26. Persist. Keep aiming high and failing. Fail better. Edison said it took him 1,000 failed attempts before he perfected the light bulb.
27. Under-promise and overdeliver. 28. John F. Kennedy: “It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you don’t care who gets the credit.”
29. When abroad, eat what’s put in front of you without complaint. Unless it’s moving.
30. Your morality will be tested every day. The dividends from always doing the right thing are incalculable. Doing the wrong thing even once can destroy much, and possibly everything you’ve built.