Ultimate Guide to Platform Building

Jack shares tips and observations from a decade and a half of advertising experience to help small business owners properly employ advertising media. He discusses the two essential types of advertising, focusing on why they are so important, what their strengths are, how they work together to create leads, and how to best use them in a growing business. Sensible Small Business Advertising underscores the importance of developing a good working relationship with ad salespeople and teaches you the way to spell SUCCESS that will stick from start-up to mature business. Informative, useful, and written in an easy, casual, nontechnical format, Sensible Small Business Advertising helps business owners maximize results while minimizing costs through a no-nonsense advertising program.

This book explains how to overcome the two fundamental challenges facing successful entrepreneurs as their businesses grow: how to develop the efficiency, reliability, and cost control of a successful company given the common constraints of too little time and too few resources, such as money and people, and how to achieve these essential attributes of business performance without losing the entrepreneurial creativity and spirit that made them successful in the first place. Readers will learn why so many smart entrepreneurs fail in managing business success and growth, as well as how to change day-to-day leadership approaches and techniques in moving from fledgling start-up to the rapid growth stage that involves many more expectations from employees, customers, and investors. The book serves as a "how-to" guide for leading growth that demonstrates how to execute internal growth strategies to develop the needed flexible systems, performance measures, management techniques, and rewards and risk management strategies.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.

The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”

Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

The lack of personal accountability is a problem that has resulted in an epidemic of blame, victim thinking, complaining, and procrastination. No organization—or individual—can successfully compete in the marketplace, achieve goals and objectives, provide outstanding service, engage in exceptional teamwork, or develop people without personal accountability.  

John G. Miller believes that the troubles that plague organizations cannot be solved by pointing fingers and blaming others. Rather, the real solutions are found when each of us recognizes the power of personal accountability. In QBQ! The Question Behind the Question®, Miller explains how negative, ill-focused questions like “Why do we have to go through all this change?” and “Who dropped the ball?” represent a lack of personal accountability. Conversely, when we ask better questions—QBQs—such as “What can I do to contribute?” or “How can I help solve the problem?” our lives and our organizations are transformed.

THE QBQ! PROMISE

This remarkable and timely book provides a practical method for putting personal accountability into daily actions, with astonishing results: problems are solved, internal barriers come down, service improves, teams thrive, and people adapt to change more quickly. QBQ! is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to learn, grow, and change. Using this tool, each of us can add tremendous worth to our organizations and to our lives by eliminating blame, victim-thinking, and procrastination.

                                                                                                 
QBQ! was written more than a decade ago and has helped countless readers practice personal accountability at work and at home. This version features a new foreword, revisions and new material throughout, and a section of  FAQs that the author has received over the years.