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 […]
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 […]
16. Long Tail Lessons for Small Business
Summing up all the ideas in ‘The Long Tail’ by Chris Anderson into a series of do’s and don’ts for small business is pretty straightforward as he concludes the book with 9 Long Tail rules for web-based businesses (and some of these rules are also relevant for non-web-based businesses that use the web in some way). But […]
15. The economics of Anderson’s Long Tail for small business
Anderson puts very well, I think, the nature of the Long Tail when he says: “In the tyranny of physical space an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all” and then goes on to show how the web has changed all this. The new economics is that demand keeps on […]
1. The Apprentice Hullaballoo
This blog was written after the end of a series of the TV show: The Apprentice, and it started me thinking about the relevance of large business experience to small business, and started a series of blogs that provide a round-up of classic business thinking but applied to small business. So everyone has had their say on […]
