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25. Peter Drucker – the gurus’ guru – but what about small business?
Peter Drucker is probably the most influential business guru of all time. Born in 1909, died in 2005, he published his first book, The Concept of the Corporation, in 1946 and his last, The Effective Executive in Action, in 2005 at the age of 95! He more or less created the concept of business management: before […]
25. Dale Carnegie – tipster or visionary for your small business?
You can read Dale Carnegie and pick up some useful pointers – you can use them like a series of useful tricks of the trade, such as the appeal to noble motives, or the early question to which they must answer ‘yes’. Indeed, the telesales industry has recognised the efficacy of one of Carnegie’s precepts: […]
24. Small businesses: getting them to change their mind without giving offence
Dale Carnegie has nine ways to achieve this, and as usual, they are simple and straightforward: but we still do not always follow this path: 1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation. The objective is to get them to work with you rather than against you, so start with what you agree with, or what you […]
23. Dale Carnegie on Winning People to Your Way of Thinking
Dale Carnegie comes up with 12 ways of winning people to your point of view – again, nothing that should not be obvious, but how often do we hear people not following these guidelines, and how often do we not follow them ourselves? Point 1: Avoid arguments – you are hardly ever going to win […]
22. Making Dale Carnegie’s precepts work for small business
Dale Carnegie’s six simple principles to make people like you: 1. be genuinely interested in them. 2. Smile! 3. Remember their names. 4. Listen well. 5. Reflect their interests. and 6. Make them feel important and do it sincerely. Simple but not easy. Most entrepreneurs are strong personalities, usually quite self confident and self-centred, and in a […]
21. Blindingly obvious advice for small business
When you write down Dale Carnegie’s advice in simple summary without the detail in the text it all sounds blindingly obvious. But then that’s true of much more academic business books too. The fact is that most things that are going to make most difference to most businesses are common sense and straightforward – just […]
20. How to win friends for small business
I am staying with gurus born in the nineteenth century for the moment – it seems incredible that they could still have something to say relevant to today, but most fundamentals never change. My next guru has more in common with personal development superstars like Tony Robbins and Stephen Covey than with the more academic […]
19. Scientific Management for small business
From the previous article in this series you will hopefully have got an idea of what a small business might pick up from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management – an approach which is now a century old. This time I thought I would try to be a bit more prescriptive and just say what I think there […]
18. Small business help from beyond the grave
A spooky title – are we into seances? Well, no. But just because the business guru is no longer alive does not mean there are not a number of useful lessons for small business. For instance let’s go back a long way – Frederick Winslow Taylor died in 1917; he was born in 1856. His major […]
17. Long Tail example in the Sunday Times
Some years ago I was reading the Sunday Times over the weekend and came across an article which was the perfect example of what I had been writing about the Long Tail, both as a reality and how the idea has become sufficiently established for it to help mould – or at least express – business views. The article […]
