You sit upright and move closer to the edge of your seat. Your heart starts to beat a little faster. Your level of excitement starts to elevate. And then your imagination kicks everything else out of your brain. Bob's Ten Steps to Effective Management Process tour is coming to town! Hot dog!
The excitement overtakes you. A couple of breaths into a brown paper bag saves you from passing out. As you take a moment to bask in your new found wonder, you look at the bookcase directly across the room. There is Suzie's Get Motivated tape set, and Billy's Psychoanalyzing Your Staff For Dummies book, and Don's Financial Education for Harvard Dropouts DVD and workbook, and Christy's Banish Kindercare Empower Your Associates book set. You know. Well, you and Sally in purchasing know. Together, both of you know that not one other person in your company knows anything about the latest and greatest business books and seminars you've collected and gone to. And you own the company.
Six Disciplines For Excellence is a book and business methodology that focuses on a business system and its implementation. Implementation is the stuff you do after you've read the book and gone to the seminar. I experienced three strong reactions after reading this book.
1) The Six Discipline Methodology begs for help with facilitation. I think this is the root of the system's success. If you don't get help, the secret is still between you and Sally.
2) Six Disciplines For Excellence is what the E-Myth Revisited wants to be when it grows up. The impact of this thought hit home after reading Chapter Three: Align Systems.
3) A sense for what an incredible amount of work it was that went into developing the entire system. Author
Gary Harpst founded Solomon Software in 1980, a company that specialized in
business management software, and used twenty years of successful
business as a foundation for his book and corporation.
I am not going to discuss the innards of this book's content. Instead, I will direct you to a Web site that links out to some very well written reviews of Six Disciplines For Excellence.
I look at this book as the opportunity for a glimpse into the framework of an excellent company and the opportunity to ask yourself, as a business owner, do you want your company to be excellent? Two ultra-cool and encouraging attributes to Six Disciplines For Excellence:
1) It is geared for small business.
2) It will work with any type of business.
One gets a peek into the system and possibilities of processes via the book's very format. A separate chapter is dedicated to each Discipline. Gary Harpst provides an overview, outlines a process of implementation and provides tips for implementation. Charts and checklists reinforce a clear sense of structure.
The last thought I would like to leave you with, is what an incredible job that Skip Reardon, Director of Marketing for the Six Disciplines Corporation, does in support of the book and his company via the Be Excellent Web site. Skip provides invaluable business information and insight as well as reinforcing lessons from the book. Scroll through Be Excellent to find those well written book reviews that I told you about.
Six Disciplines : The company.
Six Disciplines For Excellence : The book.
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