Customer Reviews

No-Nonsense Planning

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This is a book you buy and never loan to anyone. Ever. This book saved my bacon more than once. Although I was (and still am) a good marketer, Sloma's genuinely no-nonsense approach taught me critical lessons that allowed a smaller specialty publishing company to outmaneuver and defeat larger companies. Years later, we still own our niche. And I attribute that to Sloma's book. Fortunately, Mr. Sloma wrote several other titles that are a true curriculum for self-employed and corporate managers wanting to be better leaders. These include: Getting It to the Bottom Line, A Handbook of Managerial Performance, and the Turnaround Manager's Handbook. I would balance Sloma with reading Juran on Quality or other similar titles by Juran.

Of the 20 business principles laid out in this book, one stands out to me as being the most important. It's the principle #4. Before I quote this principle, let me say where I'm coming from: software development. In this field, we try to do some design and planning of what and how we will develop a piece of functioning software. For notation, we try to use the UML notation to do the design, whether it is written down somewhere or at least thought out. There are different facets to viewing what we wish to build: use cases; classes and relationships between them; activity charts (control flow); sequence diagrams; and state changes. Although Sloma's book is about business, so can software development be looked as one. A business has entities, they relate to each other either statically or dynamically and as a whole, or a system, this business should produce an output. The question I'd been interested in is this: of all the design approaches, which one has the biggest bang for the buck?

Principle 4 in this book states the following: "Always Plan with Events, Never with Processes." So, according to Sloma, the answer is the sequence diagram, which is where events between the objects in an object-oriented design is thought out. I agree with this assessment, because all the other views seem to change drastically based on the dialogues (or events) between system entities. Sloma calls 'events' the "quanta or building blocks" of design. I'll call them hinge points, too, without which all falls apart.

I read Sloma's first book, No-Nonsense Management and his punchy, in-your-face style was WAY ahead of its time. He gives it to you straight and I just wish I could have known the man. If you can get your hands on the hard to find No-Nonsense Government it will blow your mind. This particular book is a Planning how-to from the ground up without being pedantic or condescending. Definitely worth it.

This gentlemen Richard Sloma was my business instructor at my local college. He is a smart, intellectual man and this book proves it! If you want a no-nonsense, honest approach to management in business, get this book! Too bad there aren't more books like this in the mainstream today, it is a great find! If you get this book, you wont be disappointed.