01727 837760

Business Efficiency

49. Tom Peters Thriving on Chaos for Small Business (part 11)

Tom Peters’ book, Thriving on Chaos (1987), which overthrew or updated his thoughts in In Search of Excellence, comes up with 12 keys to success in the new world he saw as emerging in the late eighties, and these are particularly relevant to small business and are still relevant now. Some of the ideas recently […]

46. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 8

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s 7th precept for successful businesses was keep simple and lean staff. If you do not have staff, easy to do! And surely this is not difficult for any small business employing small numbers? But even small businesss sometimes continue with outdated processes, employing staff undertaking processes that are no longer […]

43. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 5

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s fourth precept for successful businesses in In Search of Excellence was people productivity. Peters was very interested in the tendency of large corporations to focus heavily on and invest significantly in equipment in their search for improved performance and competitiveness, but to rarely give a similar focus on people. Automating […]

37. Peter Drucker in his own words interpreted for small business part 9

Peter Drucker’s three questions – although starting with ‘what is our business?’ are essentially externally focused on the customer, how they see your business and what they value. But Drucker also looks a lot at the internal process in terms of releasing the capabilities of people and focusing talents on where they are best employed. […]

32. Peter Drucker in his own words interpreted for small business 4

“Management is mostly to do with people, not procedures”. Those of you who have been following this series will have read about Frederick Winslow Taylor and his Scientific Management work. His mechanistic approach to efficiency (which focused on what is the most effective set of physical actions to complete a physical process) ignored the fact that […]

31. Peter Drucker in his own words interpreted for small business 3

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things” – you could substitute the words ‘management’ and ‘leadership’ if you want to. And the distinction is critical. Focusing on making a process work smoothly and seamlessly and achieving that can be very satisfying, but if it is not the right process, it will not […]

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 […]

Page 2 of 212

Quality Assured Member