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Less Is More: How Great Companies Use Productivity (Hardcover)
by Jason Jennings
Category:
Business Management, Business & Investing |
Market price: ¥ 268.00
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¥ 248.00
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MSL Pointer Review:
A great study of how business should be run: Stay true to yourself, your employees and your customers and success will be yours. |
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Author: Jason Jennings
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Pub. in: November, 2002
ISBN: 1591840015
Pages: 272
Measurements: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00998
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1591840015 Language: American English
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- MSL Picks -
Jennings, author of the popular It's Not the Big That Eat the Small: It's the Fast That Eat the Slow and founder of the media consultancy firm Jennings-McGlothin & Co., has undertaken to teach companies how to increase their productivity. He draws upon the experiences of successful programs for enhancing productivity and explains how businesses can emulate these programs to improve their own profitability. Thousands of companies were investigated by Jennings's research team, and those selected were scrupulously examined to weed out overexposed companies or potential Enrons. Each research-based chapter highlights what is special about these companies-whether it be vision, commitment, communication, customer relations, efficiency, or organizational culture. The book is readable and entertaining as well as informative, and the current economic climate is sure to make it a welcome addition to the popular management literature. - From Library Journal
Target readers:
Business managers
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Jason Jennings owned his first radio station at age twenty-two, and later founded Jennings-McGlothlin & Co., which became the largest media consultancy in the world. Named one of the Twenty-Five Best Speakers in America by the Nationwide Speakers Bureau, he lectures more than seventy-five times per year. Jennings lives in Tiburon, California.
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From the publisher
From the author of the bestselling It's Not the Big That Eat the Small, It's the Fast That Eat the Slow comes a vital new guide to increasing business productivity without adding employees or other overhead costs.
Managers and CEOs are always looking for ways to keep productivity high, and recent economic shakiness has only reinforced their need. Now Jason Jennings, a bestselling author and international business consultant, offers a groundbreaking look at how to boost productivity and your bottom line.
In Less Is More, Jennings shares tested and successful programs from the leading giants in industry and presents new trends that businesses of all sizes will be able to implement. Inside, you'll learn how to:
* increase sales 300 percent without increasing head count * become 10 times more efficient * keep track of every penny * use technology and automation in your favor
Written in the same breezy, informative style of Jennings's previous book, Less Is More is sure to join its predecessor on bestseller lists nationwide.
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A Simple BIG Objective
In the absence of a simple BIG objective to act as a unifying force, no leader or manager can hope to make a company more productive. -Bill Zollars, CEO, Yellow Freight
Before committing even one word to paper, as I led my research team to begin the initial work of identifying a group of the world's most productive companies and figuring out how they do what they do, I'd have never guessed-not in a million years-what the theme would turn out to be for this opening chapter.
After all, the book was intended as a collection of the tactics employed by these firms to be more efficient than other businesses, proving the proposition that Less Is More. I'd imagined getting right into things with machine gun staccato . . . bang, they do this, bang, bang, they do that, bang, bang, bang!
Then a big discovery went boom and got in the way of my plans. Here it is: In productive companies, the culture is the strategy.
As I crisscrossed the United States and traveled the world, hanging out with the customers, workers, managers and leaders of companies where less is more, a single indisputable fact kept confronting me:
Unlike other companies, productive companies know the difference between tactics and strategy.
That difference is the foundation that allows them to stay focused and build remarkable companies. They have institutionalized their strategy.
There's a lot of bang, bang, bang stuff in the chapters to follow but, as a result of our exhaustive research, I'm convinced that a company will never become truly productive unless the management can learn to nail down the differences between strategy and tactics and allow the strategy to become the culture.
Strategy du Jour
If you keep your ears open on airplanes, at business meetings and in boardrooms, you'll hear the word "strategy" tossed around so frequently as to render it meaningless. It seems everyone has a strategy for this, a strategy for that, a strategy for everything from dealing with the kids to buying a new laptop to handling the boss . . . and yep, one for being more productive. And how many people do you know who have climbed the corporate ladder because management (or human resources) identified them as "strategic thinkers"? What's even more alarming is the frequency with which companies discard one "strategy" for another in the name of being flexible. Grasping at tactic after tactic, trying this and trying that and incorrectly labeling everything they attempt as a "strategy," most companies cloud the climate, confuse the troops and do the opposite of what it takes to be productive. Productive companies keep everything clear and simple-everything including strategy.
As I came to the end of my in-depth interviews with the CEOs of the companies covered in this book, I was struck by the fact that each shared this in common; the ownership of and fierce loyalty to a very simple big objective. The big objective was the strategy and it became the culture; everything else was tactics on how to achieve it.
All of these leaders vigorously prevent anyone from mucking up their drive for productivity with some strategy du jour or the latest alphabet-soup management theory.
Imagine for a moment the power of everyone in your organization-whether a ten-employee restaurant or a thirty-thousand-worker transportation company-knowing and striving to achieve a simple big objective.
While having everyone in a company share this simple BIG objective might seem to be simply common sense, as the age-old maxim goes, the most common thing about common sense . . . is how uncommon it is.
So what are these strategies-these BIG objectives-that are held so firmly by the leaders of some of the most productive businesses in the world?
NOPE! It's Not That Vision Thing Again
People who have survived the mission and vision thing give a knowing grin and agree that most of those grandiose statements are fit only to be framed on the wall of the reception area, put on the cover of the annual report and talked about with the head honcho to show you're on the team. They definitely are not ideas anybody would actually try to carry out to get the job done better. Unfortunately, lofty mission and vision statements, like all the other empty promises too many companies make, have a rich history of not being worth squat.
The real grunt work involved in building a productive company doesn't happen in the boardroom or executive offices; it's done on the shop floor, in the offices, on the factory line, on the retail sales floor and in the field. The very people who have the ability to make a business more productive have "been there, seen that, done that" with the vision thing.
The Power of a Simple BIG Objective
One company that's a poster child for productivity, Lantech, based in Louisville, Kentucky, discovered the need for a simple BIG objective the hard way. The traditional means for a company to ready their product for shipment involve putting the individual units in boxes, putting lots of little boxes together to make a big box, then wrapping these big boxes in plastic sheeting and sending them through a heated tunnel to form a weatherproof shrink-wrap. When the big boxes come out of the tunnel, they're stacked on a pallet for forklifting onto a truck or railcar.
During the U.S. energy crisis of the 1970s, Lantech founder and chairman Pat Lancaster came up with the idea of wrapping pallets of boxes tightly with strong plastic from a continuous roll. (Picture wrapping a rubber band around your fingers a number of times.) The process meant no more need for shrink-wrap heating, which translated into significant energy savings. Patenting this process and equipment designs, the company spent the 1980s making money hand over fist. Lantech was (excuse the pun) on a roll. Today it's the world leader in stretch wrappers, palletizers and conveyor systems.
That's the bright side of the story but there was a dark side, as well. By Lancaster's admission the company wasn't doing a very good job in a lot of areas. "Quality and customer service were poor, the factory was inefficient, but there was so much demand that we just kept doing things the same old way." Until one day in 1990. "After arguments all the way to the Supreme Court," he says, "we lost our patent protection and overnight everything changed. We had to admit to ourselves that we'd been selling wheelbarrows and been pretty arrogant about it. All of a sudden everybody else could sell the same wheelbarrow. It would no longer be enough to say we didn't suck worse than our competition." Pat Lancaster realized in the dark of night and in the bright light of day that the company's free ride had ended. Unless he could dramatically reduce inventories, improve product quality, deliver superior customer service and become more productive, the days of Lantech as a company were numbered.
During the next ten years, Lantech tripled sales without increasing staff, slashed the time it took to build a single machine from five weeks to eleven hours(!), and increased productivity 1 percent a month for the entire time period-all because of one man's focus.
Pat Lancaster's simple BIG objective was to become the most efficient and productive manufacturing plant on the planet and do things better than they'd ever been done.
What? A Company More Productive Than Wal-Mart? Where?
In 1982, New Zealander Stephen Tindall founded The Warehouse, a single-location discount store in Auckland. Fast-forward twenty years and you'll find this publicly traded chain of two hundred stores across New Zealand and Australia outperforming America's Wal-Mart in every metric of productivity. While Wal-Mart puts 3.3 pennies of each sales dollar to the bottom line, The Warehouse puts 6.6. And while Wal-Mart achieves a stunning 24 percent return on equity, The Warehouse smokes them with a killer 40 percent.
At first glance you might think the success of The Warehouse is about technology, but dig deeper and you'll learn it all began and continues to exist because of a powerful simple BIG objective.
In 1982 Tindall, working for another department store, was on a buying trip to the United States and was accompanying a vendor on a supply run to a suburban New Jersey shopping center. When he saw his first suburban discount store, a light went off and he rushed home to New Zealand to quit his job and open his own store. He took his entire life savings of forty thousand dollars, rented a large old industrial-area warehouse-hence the name-and plopped down thirty thousand dollars of his start-up capital for two computerized checkout terminals. If you're wondering, as I did, where he came up with the money to stock merchandise, you'll understand why he needed the two terminals.
Tindall saw he wouldn't have money for inventory so he went to all the companies he knew that had goods sitting in their own warehouses and offered a proposition. "Put your goods in my warehouse and I'll sell them for you," he pitched prospective vendors, arguing that the stuff wasn't doing them any good sitting unsold where it was. Then, brandishing his computerized inventory and checkout system, he promised to pay them weekly for whatever he sold. The caveat was that if he didn't sell it he could return it, eventually earning him the nickname "Sell-or-Return Stephen."
"Since the day we opened the doors in our first store," Tindall says, "this company has been an enterprise where people come first." But when Tindall says the words, the needle on the B.S. meter doesn't budge. You instinctively know he's telling the truth and want to hear more. |
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View all 6 comments |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
My preconception about this book was that it would be the usual stuff of cutbacks and running lean operations. I found to my delight a very entertaining, quite well written account of a number of real world success stories, companies that far exceed their respective industries' performance standards by staying focused on what is really important. The example companies apply the most striking logic and simplicity in the tests and standards they apply to themselves and their businesses. And as for cutbacks, the book makes clear that cutbacks are just not part and parcel of companies that have shown over time they know what they are doing and where they are going. These top performers ask what resources they need and then execute flawlessly in ways, as recounted by Jason Jennings, that increase your awareness as to what is truly important in business today. Read for yourself and draw your own conclusions, but I can assure you it will make you think about what passes for conventional business wisdom. Thumbs up from this reviewer. |
Stameroff (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
Jason Jennings latest book, Less Is More, has two very rare features that establish it as a classic, head-and-shoulders above other books in this category.
The first outstanding item is easy to spot: the writing style is incisive and entertaining. When was the last time you read a book about business productivity that you thoroughly enjoyed? Even those completely unfamiliar with business tactics, financial statements and the like will find this book not only understandable but as easy to read as great fiction. And those with no background in business may be inspired to learn more, as Jennings advocates for all employees.
The second rarity is the unflinching dedication to humility, respect for the work team, and adherence to building a culture of honesty. In the aftermath of the Enron & WorldCom scandals, we need a return to basic values and simplicity. The blueprint is here in this book. |
James (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
I read this book in one sitting, and am going to return to it again and again. The style of writing is not only easy to read, but more importantly, the messages are simple yet profound. It is not often that I have read a book that from the first few pages gave me an insight into something that I had almost taken for granted. The concept of productivity is both easy and complex and Mr. Jennings has done what few authors are able to do and that is make the complex simple. Every owner of a business has to read this book. It is not filled with platitudes that sound good, it is filled with ideas and insights that can change a business and a life. I highly recommend it. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
Over the years I've read one how -to -succeed book after another and then I read this one. I concluded that this Jennings fellow says it straight and smart. He has done his homework and his intense research is obvious. I much appreciated that he did not just put some simplistic ideas together but had the courage to do a book that would showcase maverick but really strong thinking. With the economy pressing on businesses these days, this book would be an investment every single manager and owner should make. It 's an investment in time that will give business people the courage to be their best and do their best.; my business will without doubt be better off because I read (and will re-read) this solid book. I would like to congratulate the author and his team of savvy researchers. Just read it yourself and see what I mean about time well spent. |
View all 6 comments |
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