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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
