No B. S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits

No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Really Getting Rich

Dan S. Kennedy

• Editorial: Entrepreneur Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781613082751
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Management

What does it really take to get productivity from people and, by doing so, maximum profits for your business? With a nod to Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and other ruthless yet highly successful managers, Dan S. Kennedy delivers the answer. In this new edition, Kennedy expands on his proven (if radical) strategies to get accountability, profitability, and productivity from employees.In his traditional No B.S. style, Kennedy kicks traditional leadership and management ideas squarely in the teeth with a realistic, straightforward assessment of the real relationship between business owners and their employees. Uncompromising strategies help managers gain iron-fisted control and get the results they demand. This take-no-prisoners advice liberates entrepreneurs to act in their best interests and insist on implementation of their objectives. And it leads to a cooperative, high-performance team when traditional textbook methods fail. Topics include learning how to hire profitable employees, taking home as much money as possible, making every employee’s job a profit center, managing the powerful force of word of mouth, compressing the time between idea and action for maximum profits, and posing questions to individuals that force them to think and improve productivity.

CHAPTER 1

Gobbledygook “R” Us

“Because of the fluctuational predispositions of your position’s productive capacity as juxtaposed to government standards, it would be momentarily injudicious to advocate an increment.”

—ALEXANDER HAIG WHEN SECRETARY OF STATE

“I don’t get it.”

“Exactly.”

—CONVERSATION BETWEEN ALEXANDER HAIG, THEN SECRETARY OF STATE, AND HIS AIDE

I hold in my hand a brochure sent to me in the mail from a highfalutin’ university’s school of management, attempting to sell me on attending its $4,950.00 two-day seminar titled “Managing the New Workforce: Leadership and Strategy.”

This brochure, as well as the seminar it pitches, represents everything that’s wrong with at least 90% of everything being fed to business owners and executives about managing people. It is, in a word, B.S.—but let me demonstrate.

First, it’s chock full of vague, meaningless gobbledygook. Nice sounding, until you critically analyze it. Here are a few priceless examples:

Expand your own perspective and deepen your understanding of how to learn and act on the values and needs that drive a growing portion of your workforce.

Huh? What, exactly, is the take-away, practical value there? After all, you aren’t really interested in running a group therapy program for your employees, are you?

It gets better . . .

With demographic shifts come new demands on leaders who must be prepared to find, develop, and retain the New Workforce.

This is a statement of fact, not a promise of a solution. The brochure is full of these and actually only lists five benefits, one of which is that “expand your perspective” thing. And, really, what is this “New Workforce” anyway? It’s gobbledygook. It makes it sound like aliens from outer space have arrived and suddenly replaced all your employees. Hey, demographic shifts in available employees aren’t anything new. They’ve been a constant since at least the Industrial Revolution. Lincoln freed the slaves. Off we went. Women came into the workforce. Asians, Hispanics, attention-deficit-disordered youth. Pfui. And you don’t want to be prepared (with deeper understanding!) to find, develop, and retain any New Workforce anyway. That misses THE point. You want to be prepared to find, develop, and retain a productive workforce that produces maximum profit for your business. You see, the professors’ very idea of the purpose of employing people, even of owning a company, is misguided. Certainly not in sync with yours.

And I’ll bet you’ll be wildly excited about this . . .

A multigenerational panel discussion will provide an opportunity for participants to interact with undergraduate junior and senior students majoring in business. With an aim toward highlighting both differences and similarities among the generations, participants will come away with a deeper understanding of what makes these young employees tick.

There sure is a lot of talk here about “deeper understanding.” Meaning you, the guy handing out the paychecks, have to more deeply understand the gentle, fragile, difficult-to-motivate, complex individuals entrusted to your care. Gee, sounds like you’re running a day-care center.

Now here’s what is NOT mentioned anywhere in this brochure: managing people for PROFIT. I read every word very carefully. Since I was occasionally convulsed with laughter, I reread it. The word “profit” does not appear. Not even once.

I wonder why?

Because—like virtually all these university-sponsored seminars, most other management seminars, most management books, most newsletters for managers, etc.—this puppy’s being taught by people whose management experience is limited to organizing their sock drawers. No claim is made of even one day spent in the real world, dealing with real employees and real problems—let alone an imperative to create profit. This particular $4,950.00, two-day excursion into the theoretical world of psychobabble has four speakers:

An Academic Director (whatever that is) who is a visiting lecturer at the school of management. That’s it. That’s all that’s said about her in the brochure. Presumably because there’s nothing else to say.

A Chief Marketing Officer and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Marketing at, of course, the school of management. Hmm, Professor of Marketing—maybe he put this nifty brochure together.

A Diversity Coach who wrote a book, Managing Differently. Honest to Mabel, a “Diversity Coach!” “Go be diverse for the Gipper!” I wonder, are the Diversity Cheerleaders going to be there too? Maybe a marching band. Okay, that’s harsh. Heck, I run business coaching programs myself. But this diversity scam has gone way, way too far. It’s replaced the sexual harassment and gender sensitivity scam that previously sucked fortunes out of scared corporate coffers. And the fad before it. Enough already. We’re diverse. Get over it. Get to work. The job isn’t diverse. And the coach word has become the most overused term since excellence.

Nowhere does it say any of these “experts” ever took over a troubled company with horrid employee morale and massive quality control problems and turned it around. Or managed a workforce in a way that led to any measurable accomplishment, like increasing profits by 30% over a year. Or even managed a Dairy Queen. It doesn’t say any of these things because it’s selling professors. (If any of them have actually accomplished anything worth bragging about, managing a real workforce, failing to mention it is still telling. It reveals a certain mindset about the relative importance of practical experience and street smarts vs. academic theory and philosophy. There’s a smugness to it. The folks with the leather elbow patches on tweed jackets and tenure looking down their noses at us sleeves-rolled-up, boots-in-the-muck folks.)

Of course, YOU are a real business owner in the real world, very unlikely to fall for this. I imagine a bunch of corporate executives who also can’t spell p-r-o-f-i-t go on their companies’ tabs and have a grand old time playing eight-people-at-a-table workshop games with their Diversity Coach, then head for happy hour. I doubt you’d catch an entrepreneur in here on a bet.

But the trouble is, this buffoonery and charlatanism seeps out of the colleges’ little side businesses and infects the thinking of business owners in many other ways. This sort of academic gobbledygook and classroom theory finds its way into the articles you and I read in real business magazines, into the books on management we might turn to for help. These professor types actually get hired to come in and screw around in real companies we own or invest in or rely on as vendors. They get hired to speak at our associations’ conventions. And if you hear this stuff enough, you might think it has a place in your business.

It’s actually a cancer on corporate America. Untold millions of dollars and millions of hours are wasted on this sort of thing. Everybody’s in meetings and group discussions and quality circles and deeper-understanding retreats when they should be working. Managers are embroiled in trying to implement this feel-good, talk-in-circles, meaningless stuff when they need to be managing.

I’ve watched otherwise intelligent CEOs and top executives sit in meetings, listening to this silliness, none willing to state the obvious—that the professor has no clothes. I guess for fear of appearing unsophisticated in front of the others. So budgets get approved by people who won’t, themselves, have to suffer through the exercise, who can’t clearly explain what they’re buying, and who have no way of holding it accountable for increased profits.

It’s sad enough this permeates big, dumb companies.

Whatever you do, keep it out of yours. You really need to put up barriers. Inoculate yourself...