No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits: No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Really Getting Rich

by Dan S. Kennedy

That’s important to understand—they are thieves like us.

Time theft and theft by sabotage,

I told him to take the motivational tapes out of the cage and lock up the toilet paper. There was no risk of the employees stealing self-improvement tapes. But toilet paper—you betcha!

The best, most truthful, most useful business management book I have read—out of more than 300—is Levine’s book Broken Windows, Broken Business,

“broken windows theory,” was first enunciated by two criminologists in a magazine article in 1982. Their idea was that aggressively policing even the pettiest criminal acts, such as graffiti or loitering, could clean up a neighborhood and reduce all crime, because of the message it sent.

They said that a building with one broken window left unrepaired

would soon have all its windows broken, and a neighborhood with such buildings would soon be consumed by crime and decay.

Little things shrugged off inv...

. . . a broken window can be a sloppy counter,

or an employee with a bad attitude.

It can be physical, like a faded, flak...

When a call for help in assembling a bicycle results in a 20-minute hold on the phone...

They start at one end, paint to the other, turn around and paint back in the other direction. Day in, day out. Why? “Because,” the owners told me, “we are judged by our fences.”

if people’s perception of the place was “second class.” Levine says that perception is something that happens in the blink of an eye.

Simply put, you not only have to decide to have zero tolerance for broken windows in your business, but you have to be obsessed with it.

Decide that nothing is insignificant. Nothing is to be shrugged off.

You can’t afford not to.

But, hey, everybody has a bad day once in a while, right? No such permission can be given.

Your people need to show up ready to play, or you’d be better off if they stayed home and had their bad day with only their family as victims.

Just as it is fo...

known for his obsessive-compulsive behavior and temper tantrums over a lone cigarette butt left on his property’s men’s room’s f...

You need to be obsessed, compulsive, eagle-eyed, eagle-eared, intolerant, constantly leading and coaching, an...

Any broken window is one too many.

“When an employee—ANY employee—becomes a detriment to the company for ANY reason, that employee has become a broken window, and the ripple effect from his or her FAILURE, however slight, can be DEVASTATING to your business.”

My little class was scheduled for 9:00 A.M. to 11:00 A.M. on a Saturday, to be followed by a light lunch. He was to pick me up at the hotel close to his office at 8:30 A.M. He arrived at 9:05 A.M.—with me standing outside, fuming. We got to his office at 9:20 A.M.

He was his own broken window.

Perfectionism is paralysis.

Perfectionism is costly.

Perfectionism is a distraction from the reality of winning and...

I’m a huge believer in “good enough is good enough.”

But how can all this flawed output be so wildly successful?

Because its consumers care far, far more about the value of my advice, my prolific output, and my speed of providing it to them than they do about dotted i’s and crossed t’s.

And because I manage their expectations carefully, and overdeliver against what’...

“no broken windows allowed”

“good enough is good enough”

In battlefield conditions it is most useful for everyone to have been brought up on and conditioned to perform within absolutely rigid standards.

It is my contention the very same thing is true in business. Casual can get you killed.

We can go through the restaurant industry chain by chain, Starbucks®, Dunkin’ Donuts®, Denny’s®, Dominos®, on and on. Each has a different covenant with its customers mandating certain standards.

Your leadership role here is to figure out exactly what your customers value most vs. value least in a relationship with a business like yours.

Not what’s important to you. Not what you think should be important to them. What IS important to them.

To figure out what aspects of your business offer opportunity to ...

To be able to communicate this clearly to others.

You must arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the “Good Enough Spot”

in every aspect of your...

Having a clear and definitive “Good Enough Spot” for every aspect of your business is the most empowering management breakthrough possible—

For a service business that gets a lot of its business from Yellow Pages ads, like plumbers or chiropractors, we have ironclad empirical evidence that huge, invisible losses are suffered by businesses not answering 24/7,

(Switching these office phones to staff members’ cell phones in rotation or to an outside “live” answering service equipped with good scripts and the ability to set appointments or at least guarantee return calls within a set time has proven to be immensely profitable

A very visible secret about companies that really prosper is that they have clearly understood covenants with their customers.

Disney’s theme parks’ covenant is Walt’s original “The Happiest Place on Earth

There’s something going on constantly to make everybody happy.