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33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Telling Owner/Tyrants What They Want to Hear, November 25, 2009
This review is from: Profits Aren't Everything, They're the Only Thing: No-Nonsense Rules from the Ultimate Contrarian and Small Business Guru (Hardcover)
Someone had to write this book. I suppose all this talk about Employee Engagement, stakeholders, and purpose driven workforce was going to drive someone to write a book with very much the contrarian view of these things.
This is that book.
Unfortunately, contrarian does not mean correct. There are a lot of ways you can examine this author's premises and find large, gaping holes. Micromanagement is one. The problem with micromanagement is that any organization of significance - with more than a couple dozen people, is going to have more moving parts than one person can possibly manage, much less micromanage. The model simply does not scale, and this author does not offer anything about when the micromanagement model is to be retired.
A second obvious place you attack is the premise that creating a strict, rule bound, Taylorian workforce is a foolproof path to profits. The evidence is pretty well in that such a model does not work. It is bad for large organizations like GM, and worse for smaller organizations that require innovation and creativity - things that do not emerge in tight, rule bound environments, to create breakthroughs that make a small business have any chance for alpha vis-a-vis his competitors.
Lastly, the advice about paying vendors late - well, that might be a good survival strategy, but when you pay vendors late, they often take notice. Any effort your vendor might have taken to go "above and beyond" the call is going to go away when vendors start prioritizing that effort by how late their receivables are.
The things that make an organization great, extra effort at the margins - simply dont happen in the environment of fear that this author openly promotes. The book is a great manual on how to become a petit tyrant who owns an enterprise of maybe a dozen people, who never does anything but work. Frankly, as much as I would never want to be a worker in this model, I would want to be a boss even less. When you are on your deathbed, you don't go "man, I wish I spent more time at the office managing my workforce by fear".
There are a couple good points, which merited adding a star. Golf is a colossal waste of time - especially for CEOs. Hiring family is also an idiotic idea. Those chapters are patently good advice that, sadly, are buried under a lot of other quite horrible advice.
That all said, there is a market for telling the Petit Tyrants of the world what they want to hear (no wonder this guy proudly consults for the nations "Council of Mayors"). If anything, such a book is a nice one to sit on the bookshelf next to all the "Management by Donald Trump" books the author is seeking to compete with.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Love-Hate Relationship, July 28, 2010
This review is from: Profits Aren't Everything, They're the Only Thing: No-Nonsense Rules from the Ultimate Contrarian and Small Business Guru (Hardcover)
Unlike many authors, George practices what he preaches. Every day and relentlessly. Its how his AMS functions.
I worked for George for 2.5 years. Saying it was not fun is an understatement. I made 200-300K, but worked like a fool and was manipulated like a puppet. I never felt respected. I "escaped" as soon as practical.
George was pompous, arrogant, condescending and, yes, very rich.
Give the man his due: The recipe works.
It should - its about as fundamental as you can get. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE BALL...fanatically and relentlessly.
Pay for performance. Predetermined profit. Critical success indicator monitoring. All are concepts that few small businesses are aware of let alone utilize. Small or Big Business: You can't win without them.
A few year ago I purchased a "near-dead" business. I took the basic disciplines I learned at AMS and applied them.
Unlike AMS we respected and celebrated all employees. Like AMS we demanded and paid for superior results. The high performers loved the model; the weak links hugged us before exiting.
PS My "near-dead" business sold in mid-seven figures at the beginning of this year.
Thank you so much, George - you SOB.
The thing that separatesMake no mistake he lives and breathes this stuff
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15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
How to keep a small business small, November 18, 2009
This review is from: Profits Aren't Everything, They're the Only Thing: No-Nonsense Rules from the Ultimate Contrarian and Small Business Guru (Hardcover)
Cloutier has some good advice for anyone who thinks that the only three things that matter in business are money, money and money. But anyone who follows his advice in managing their small business is almost guaranteed that the business will remain just that - small.
Cloutier says, among other things, that small business managers should never trust anyone and micromanage everything; they should love their business more than their family; that fear is the best motivator; that paying vendors late is "good business practice" and turnover is healthy (forget loyalty - you're only in it for the money); and in a chapter called "I Am Your Work God" (no, I'm not making that up) that the small business owner must be a tyrant who wants people to mindlessly follow directions and not think for themselves.
I assume the small business owners he consults with must be successful at making money, or he himself would be out of business. But I can almost guarantee that not one of his client companies will ever show up in the Fortune 500. Quite to the contrary, if you study the leadership practices of the people who built great companies, they are almost without exception the exact opposite of what Cloutier tells his clients to be.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Mary Kay Ash, Herb Kelleher, Ray Kroc, Tom Watson, Robert Wood Johnson: go down the list of great business founders and you will find people who were not in it just for the money; who did trust and empower others; who did treat people with respect and dignity and who appreciated the sustaining power of loyalty; and who did understand that for the leader who wants to create a business that is "built to last" the three most important things are not money, money and money - they're people, people and people.
I give this book two stars instead of just one because Cloutier does offer some sound advice. In particular, he's dead-on when it comes to the pernicious effects of denial and procrastination, and the importance of making sales a top priority. His "profits first" approach to budgeting makes sense, but runs the risk of promoting short-term decisions that are penny-wise but pound-foolish.
I would donate this book to the local library, but I'm afraid someone in my community might check it out and decide that they had to become a work-god tyrant.
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