No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits - by Dan S. Kennedy
ISBN: 9781613082751Date read: 2025-06-21
How strongly I recommend it: 4/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
His cantakerous-old-man style is refreshing. Super pragmatic. I have no employees now so most of it was moot but it was a refreshing and slightly inspiring read.
my notes
“Deeper understanding”, meaning you, the guy handing out the paychecks, have to more deeply understand the gentle, fragile, difficult-to-motivate, complex individuals entrusted to your care. Gee, sounds like you’re running a day-care center.
Not mentioned anywhere in this brochure: managing people for profit.
Millions of dollars and hours are wasted on this sort of thing.
Everybody’s in meetings and group discussions and quality circles and deeper-understanding retreats when they should be working.
If you occasionally accept occasional unacceptable behavior, it’s only a matter of time before you are routinely accepting routine unacceptable behavior.
Absolutely no evidence whatsoever that a manager liked by the employees creates more productivity or more profitability for the company.
Everywhere else I’ve seen the “care and feeding of” approach taken, it has ruined productivity and profits.
When you come to work, you should be in a workplace, and you should work hard, fast, and intensely.
You should be laser-beam focused.
You should be under pressure of urgency.
If you can’t or won’t manage yourself, what makes you think you should or can manage others?
If you can’t or won’t measure, daily, your progress toward specific goals, how will you persuade anybody else to do so?
If you won’t hold yourself ruthlessly accountable, how dare you hold anyone else accountable?
“Sloppiness” is not a privilege or perk of being the boss or the owner.
My book, No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs might better be titled Self-Management.
A problem with Gerber’s concepts in the E-Myth.
Gerber calls his system “the franchise model.”
In his model you create all the systems and give them to your employees.
That means that all of your business’ improvement is dependent on you!
I hate to break this to you, but you just ain’t that smart.
Personal Deveopment Interviews:
When that interview is running properly, the interviewer (you or your managers) will be talking about 20% and the subordinate will be talking 80%.
The person being interviewed should leave pumped up, ready to go after every interview.
Your job, as the interviewer, is to make sure they are pumped up, ready to go, and achieve their objectives.
The only time they should leave a Personal Development Interview disappointed is if you’re ready to fire them.
I own four businesses and conduct PDIs with the six people who report directly to me.
I meet with each person, every other week, for about 20 minutes.
So, on average, I spend one hour a week in PDIs.
The ultimate truth of owning, training, and racing horses is: They ALL go lame.
As the saying goes, it’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.
With the horses, they mostly go lame physically.
But some go lame psychologically.
They lose their personal passion for competing; they lose their will to win.
Or they become overly picky about the conditions required for their peak performance.
So it is with your employees, associates, partners, and vendors. At some point, every single one of them will go lame.
A man’s got to know his limitations.
I had basically gone lame. I was bored, irritable, and tired with the many business functions.
I’d gone lame and I needed to be sent packing.
Since there was nobody to fire me, I fired myself.
I sold him the business via a formula involving a purchase price, a consulting fee, an ongoing royalty, and opportunities to create new joint ventures, and we reduced and narrowed my responsibilities almost entirely to those things I’m not only exceptionally skilled at but also enjoy and have a passion for doing.
As soon as we got the lame guy (me) out of the way, the business began multiplying.
I subtitled this book “Ruthless Management of People and Profits.”
I did not specify other people.
Ruthless self-assessment is the most difficult of all entrepreneurial tasks.
The worst number in business is one.
One of just about anything is a bad thing.
If you are going to have one who performs “x” duties, and they are essential duties, you need two.
With two, you are the boss, and you can, if and when need occurs, be ruthless.
With one, you are not a boss at all. You are a hostage.
Cross training means everybody is trained in everybody else’s job.
Job sharing means two part-time people doing one full-time job.
Hire slow, fire fast.
If you wanted to do something—anything—successfully and you had no instructions, no role model, no road map, no mentors, all you needed to do was look around at how the majority was doing that thing, then do the opposite—because the majority is always wrong.
Exceptional people can thrive with bad leadership, mediocre leadership, or no leadership at all, too.
I don’t care what you can’t do.
I want to hear what you can do.
Any idiot can create a long list of reasons something can’t be done.
The genius is in figuring out how something can be done.
Short stock in any entity where the CFO becomes the CEO.
CFOs love numbers, not products or businesses.
They love rigid order, not entrepreneurial chaos or spirit.
Michael Gerber, the famous E-Myth guy, says most business owners spend way too much time working in their business rather than on their business.
A decade ago, I agreed with him 100%. Now I don’t.
His observation is sometimes true. It’s a sin many business owners do commit.
However, there are just as many who sin by not working in their businesses at all.
Some even avoid working in or on their businesses!
If you dislike your business so much or are interested in it so little that you avoid being there, working in it, working on it, then sell it, give it away, or burn it down.
I went around to the communities to personally experience the sales presentations.
Guess what we never saw or heard?
The sales presentation delivered as it was supposed to be. Not once.
You could fire them all but then, what do you replace them with?
You just are not going to find a small army of voluntarily compliant salespeople.
The only way to get compliance is to compel it.
Success very, very rarely occurs on the honor system.
“the Good Enough Spot:”
Figure out what your customers value most vs. value least in a relationship with a business like yours.
Never go to bed with someone whose troubles are greater than your own.
Bonuses should buy something that you can clearly and definitively measure.
Bonuses should encourage profitable behavior, encourage education and self-improvement, encourage doing difficult or uncomfortable things.
They are not gifts or obligations.
They are tools.
Ideas have a way of losing their power as their owners lose passion and enthusiasm for them over time.
They dissipate.
If you feel a need to be a bit more prudent and methodical, at least set a relatively short time frame.
That first weekend, bolt yourself away with all the information you can assemble, build the complete to-do list in steps, assign completion times to each step, list obstacles to overcome, people to find, build the whole plan, and implement at least some of it first thing Monday morning.
Put things into motion before ready.
Start multiple projects simultaneously recognizing only some of them will succeed.
Every relationship is easier to get into than to get out of.
Never go in anywhere without a predetermined escape route.
Never enter any relationship without a prenegotiated exit.
Poor people have big TVs.
Rich people have big libraries.
They can walk you through their big libraries and tell you what actions they took as a result of each of the hundreds and hundreds of books on the shelves.
Extremely successful people put themselves under extreme pressure to perform—and thrive on it.
You can accomplish more in 12 months than in the previous 12 years. That’s possible.
The trigger is the deciding.
Determining everything you will get DONE in the next 12 months, the next 12 weeks, the next 12 days, the next 12 hours.