As I write this, I am a Level 2 Engineering Manager at a Medium-sized Enterprise. This is the book that I wish someone had given me when I was initially promoted into a Management position from being an Individual Contributor. While the book is clearly aimed at the Entrepreneur and Small Business Owners, it is important to remember one of the author’s key points: fundamentally, all businesses are the same. Meaning, all the lessons-learned in this book that will clearly optimize growing businesses apply for larger enterprises and it really helps established employees gain a perspective of all the moving parts of a business that they are not privy to. Especially once you hit 100+ companies and ‘Silos’ start to appear, most non-Managerial employees really have little visibility into what makes a business work and understanding all the Systems and Processes that are needed to run them – and how to optimize them. This book really helps provide this perspective and intro to Business Systems Thinking. I have learned the hard way many of the lessons in this book, which could have saved me earlier “growing pains.” A broad swath of topics is covered in this book to really get you thinking and identifying inefficiencies and using tools to optimize them. One thing that I appreciated was the author’s theme that you do not need to make Systems complicated or spend $$$$ on specialized software to achieve your desired outcomes and outputs. A lot of real-world use-cases and examples are set forth in this book to really help connect the abstract to reality as you can see the author is genuinely trying to help the reader apply these lessons in their domains. To that note, it’s interesting to note that the core topics of the book ends about ¾ of the way through and a succession of ‘Bonus Chapters’ unfold primarily focused on the author’s experience in real settings showing real-world problems and how he used Systems Thinking to solve them. Good read, and a good book to have handy to refresh yourself.
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2020
- Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2020
- Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2020
- Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2020
Top reviews from other countries
- Mr DN NashReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 3, 2020
Excellent guide to building systems
- PompetteReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 9, 2020
Make you pause and ask the right questions so you can measure the right things
- Alan salterReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2020
Learn to look at your business through a different lens
Brian has a knack for making what could potentially be quite a boring and complex topic but delivers it in a way that is easy to understand.Alan salterLearn to look at your business through a different lens
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2020
Full of practical and implementation ideas to my business, definitely worth grabbing a copy to get you thinking about working ‘on’ your business as opposed to being busy in the business all the time!
I particularly liked the sections on importance of building company culture early on, as I’ve seen and been part of this not being done so well.
Also his way of explaining the efficiency, productivity effectiveness really helped my logical brain soak it up.
All in all a great book
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- ElizabethReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2020
Perfect the outcomes of your business
