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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Summaries of the Best Business Book Ideas in One Volume!, 13 May 2004
Are you too busy to read dozens of business books? Using this one volume can help you obtain most of the benefit from the top books of the last two decades. This book will probably be most appealing to people in their 20s who are trying to make some sense out of how to get ahead, but don't have much education or experience on the subject. Now a 100 ideas sounds like a lot. You should know that Tracy often breaks them into subsets, so the total is really somewhere between 300 and 400 ideas. You'll really feel loaded down before he's done sharing with you. They are all about positive thinking, exchanging value for value, and being persistent. Ben Franklin would approve of the emphasis on improvement. For example, the first set of laws are about Life -- and they read pretty much like a modern version of Think and Grow Rich. Two things bothered me about the book. One was the lack of attribution (except for a list of books at the end). For example, Tracy says that the purpose of a business is to create a customer -- perhaps Peter Drucker's single most famous quote, but you look in vain for quotation marks or a reference to Drucker. The book that Drucker said it in (Management) is not cited in the bibliography. The second thing that bothers me is that in some places Tracy is a little behind the curve. In the Dell-like Internet world, products and service can be customized for each person and that will be the wave of the future. Tracy still talks about segmenting customers rather than individualizing products and customers for each different customer. So you might ask, why should I read this book? Frankly, it's because you probably won't read all of those books in his bibliography. This way, you'll at least get Tracy's take on what all of this means. One of the nice things about his work is he gives you directions for how to begin applying each principle. My final quibble is that there is an appendix with pages of services and products that Tracy sells. I don't think such advertisements belong in a business book that someone has paid for. Skip the appendix. After you have finished reviewing the lists here, I suggest that you think about how you can turn these ideas into good habits. One useful approach would be to create your own outlines to apply the 100 items to classes of actions and decisions that you make all of the time. For example, if you are in sales, how should you use these ideas for getting prospects? After you have that outline, you can develop some measures to tell you whether you are following the outline or not. When it becomes automatic to do so, keep measuring and make another outline. In the case of sales, you might look next at identifying what the customer's needs are. And then keep going. Become a living model of best practices!
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