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

“Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.”

you can’t buy morale or compliance this way.

You don’t want “the gray man syndrome”: a business populated with people gray of pallor, gray of dress, gray of mind. But I am pretty certain you don’t want a perpetual Chuck E. Cheese® party going on either.

I have since discovered that no business is much like what it seems to outsiders.

Most businesses’ success has a whole

lot more to do with organized, disciplined, machinelike w...

met or some of the places I went; I did. But the fun was “around” the work, not in the work itself. The work was high stress, high pressure, and mind numbing.

I’ve been an insider of sorts in over 150 different kinds of businesses. The successful ones all have this in common: work that isn’t much fun.

There’s a profound difference between enjoying your work and the people you work with, doing work you’re confident at, good at, and proud of, feeling rewarded by...

Beneath the happy, fun veneer of these companies lies a comprehensive,

microdetailed and aggressively enforced collection of policies that keep tight control over what seems to be footloose and fancy-free employees

and that focus on, measure, and ma...

To the casual observer, it may seem improvisational. To the insiders, it is...

These books devote little or no attention to the rigid choreography.

Pressed, they admitted that everything and everybody is intently measured.

Disney® is also an intensely hierarchal environment,

Disney® is all about tightly scripted performances,

“Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself

that you were born to control affairs.”

I’m quite sure working for Trump is no Sunday picnic.

Actually, every highly successful entrepreneur I’ve ever been around is a

boss from hell by many of their employees’ and ex-emplo...

Bosses of high-profit companies don’t give ’em hell. The employees ...

In her book Ballsy, the very talented and clever author Karen Salamansohn writes: “There are no wishy-washy rock stars. No wishy-washy astronauts. No wishy-washy Nobel Prize winners. No wishy-washy CEOs.” As a matter of fact, everybody in the super-high achiever category is pushy, demanding, impatient, intolerant, prone to losing their cool, screaming, throwing things, and sendi...

Steve Jobs was and Jeff Bezos is famous, or if you prefer, infamous for their extreme impatience. In his book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon, Brad Stone notes that intensity and volatility are not at all unique to Jobs or Bezos, and cites Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’ successor at Microsoft—famous for throwing chairs, coach Bobby Knight style. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was legendary for vicious conversations with underperforming executives. A subordinate once fainted during a particularly harsh performance review. Bezos largely ignored new-style leadership ideas like c...

My own personal investment strategy—not that I’m dispensing investment advice for you—is to focus on the person at the helm.

I work mostly with entrepreneurs, not corporate executives.

My advice to entrepreneurs is: Hire the thick-skinned.

Hire people who can perform under pressure, be unfazed by your outbursts and tantrums, be responsive to sudden an...

Do not hire the gentle or fragile of disposition to work anywhere in close proximity to you or d...

If you are a highly charged, hard driving, highly successful entrepreneur, then, quite a bit of the time, you aren’t going to be a lot of fun to be around, especially fo...

you shouldn’t be adapting to suit them.

Be wary of fixing yourself to suit “them.” Remember, they work for you!

In most businesses, sadly, selling is an act, not a process.

Examine just about any business with more than one person doing the selling, and you’ll find each salesperson doing things differently than the others.

If you want maximum profits, you’ll figure out what the best sales presentation is, and everybody will use it.

You need a program for selling that all your salespeople comply with and use.

“If you don’t have a system for selling, you are at the mercy of the customer’s system for buying.”

Such a system has to be built at the macro and micro levels.

The micro parts have to do with all of the human interaction between the prospect and receptionists, clerks, and, most of all, salespeople.

Selling is a scientific and mechanical process, not something you should make up as you go along.

The person widely judged as America’s number-one sales trainer, Tom Hopkins, and I are both strong advocates of scripts.

I can assure you that choice of words, that is, language, matters.

I call this Sales Choreography

We believe that everything should be choreographed, from the first step the prospect takes into the selling environment, moment by moment, movement by movement, sentence by sentence.

There’s quite a bit of resistance to this idea, of course, because it requires a lot of thought, discipline, and practice by the salespeople and other staff members and ...

Sales Design® is about mapping out step-by-step-by-step everything that is to occur with and be said to the prospect,

Stop Accepting Less Than You Should Get

“close rate”—

ranges from as poor as 25% to as good as 40%.