One of My Personal Rules for Success is to
Take Time To Read!
Like many of you, I try to read good business books that I hope will improve my business, life, or both. There are a few problems with this.
First, a lot of books are filled with advice you hear over and over. So the actual hard part is to hear a message in just the right way or at just the right time that it makes sense to you. Then, even "old" advice rings true and all the good idea bulbs go on.
Second, if you rely on recommendations from friends, they may be in a different place in their business than you. Or advice fits well with their business model, but not yours. So take advice with a grain of salt.
Third, sometimes the emperor really has no clothes. Sometimes, you read a book and end up asking yourself, why is everyone raving about this useless book. For me, a common variation on this is that there's a good core idea (nugget), but it should be a blog post, not a book. Oh well. With luck, there's some other good advice in there somewhere.
I try very hard to read at least one book per week. I am a pretty fast reader. Then, if I really like it, I will read it again. Or, I listen to it in audio format and make notes in the physical book. In my opinion, a really good book can/should be read over and over. For example, I read The E-Myth Revised by Michael Gerber once a year for the first ten years of my business. I still read it again every three or four years.
So How Do You Read A Book?
Here's my advice for business and non-fiction. I start by being hyper aware of my filters. For example, I think a lot of advice for large businesses is not very good advice for small businesses. For this discussion, we'll think of small as 250 employees or less. So it's basically every business you don't think of as "big" business.
Good to Great by Jim Collins is a great (not good) example. It's a fun, engaging read. So you sympathize with the author because you want him to be right. But all of the lessons in that book are based on really big businesses. And a lot of the advice in that book is hard to fit into a small business. That's okay. Just be aware that you have to do a lot of mental work.
What are your filters? They might be business size, related industries, service vs. merchandise, etc. Be aware of your biases.
If I find that I'm resisting a lot while I'm readying I stop and examine that. Am I failing to see the actual lesson because I'm only looking at my own filters? If so, I start over and try to consume the whole message before I start filtering it.
Another major factor is money. I'm reading the Netflix No Rules Rules book right now. And while I love the ideas, there are things you can do with billions of dollars that you just can't do with a million or less. So then I have to consider what I can still glean from the ideas I love, even if I can't implement them in total all at once.
When I write books, I try to always remind the reader: Take the advice that sounds good and makes sense. I don't run your business; I don't have your employees or clients; and I don't sell the products and services you sell. So please adapt my advice for your reality.
Now, having said that, there are times when I flat out say: Try it my way first. Then make changes if you need to. (A great example of this is, "Get paid in advance for everything.")
Perhaps the best measure of fitness, of course, is how closely the advice fits your actual business model. There's a continuum from 100% manual labor to 100% knowledge work. Running a steel mill is about 95% manual vs. 5% knowledge work. Marketing is probably exactly the reverse of that.
You service department is perhaps 10-15% manual and 85-90% knowledge. But knowledge can be passed down via books, processes, procedures, documentation, and culture. It takes some work to fit advice from other industries into your business.
Just my opinion, but reading and applying knowledge can be a lot of work.
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Happy to hear your two cents on this.