Small-Business Books That Break the Mold
Books aimed at the small business and entrepreneur audience far too often fall into two categories.
There is the “how I made $27 trillion in business, and you can too,” genre or the ones that say you only need to take care of customers (or cash flow or sales or something else) and you will be the envy of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.
The following four do not fit into either mold, and if, for no other reason, are worthy of consideration.
Let’s start with the best, and work our way through the list.
“A Whack on the Side of the Head” (Business Plus), a book about increasing creativity, has just been reissued to celebrate its 25th anniversary and it easy to understand its lasting appeal.
The author, Roger von Oech, a consultant, has taken an abstract subject — how to think differently — and made it concrete by asking a series of questions, all of which involve breaking what he calls the “mental locks” that bind our thinking.
“Most of us have certain attitudes that lock our thinking into the status quo and keep us thinking ‘more of the same,’ ” he writes. “These attitudes are necessary for most of what we do, but they get in the way when we are trying to be creative.”
He suggests breaking the locks by acknowledging that they are there and forcing yourself to pry them open.
We are typically taught, for example, that there is one right answer to a problem. But, he says, keep searching even after you find it. After all, as Linus Pauling, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in chemistry and the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize, put it, “The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.”
Perhaps one of the most appealing things about “How to Get Rich” (Ebury Press, 2006), is that the author, Felix Dennis — the publisher of Maxim, The Week and Stuff magazines, spends a lot of time discussing the mistakes he made. He didn’t understand that people who buy computer gaming magazines wanted a free game with each copy, as one of his rivals was offering. And he laments not diversifying into television and exploiting the internet.
That candor gives him credibility when he offers several warnings to entrepreneurs:
¶ Never be overoptimistic when it comes to day-to-day finances. “If cash flow is good, then no matter how badly run or poorly managed a company is, there is always a decent chance of turning it around,” he says. “But if a business’s cash flow is weak or failing, then the chances are it must shut down or be sold in the not-too distant future.”
¶ Never act big. You, and your company, should live below your means.
¶ Never skimp on hiring talent.
There are only four traditional business ideas in “The One Minute Entrepreneur” (Doubleday, 2008), the latest in the “One Minute” series by Ken Blanchard, this time assisted by Don Hutson and Ethan Willis. Here they are:
1. Revenue needs to exceed expenses
2.Collect your bills. Don’t let your customers use you to increase their cash flow.
3. Take care of your customers. “You work for them.”
4. Take care of your people.
But the appeal of the fable is not in the business advice, it is the relentlessly upbeat, encouraging message that if you work hard enough, and concentrate on the right things, you will be successful.
Like all fairy tales that have a happy ending, it would be nice to believe the message is true.
The premise underlying “Life Entrepreneurs” (Jossey Bass, 2008), by the consultants Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek, is simple. The same principles that can make you a success in starting your own business — recognizing opportunities, taking risks and innovation — can lead to a more fulfilling life as well.
They argue that you can obtain the life you want by following exactly the approach you did in starting your business: You develop a plan, in this case for what a good life would look like, and you figure out how to obtain it.
That sounds simple in the abstract. But then, again, so does starting a successful business. Hard work is required in both cases.
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