Imagine you’re me. My daily job is to successfully manage a Small Enterprise. I like smoothly running things but things are never running smooth. Let’s face it: there is… chaos. Data missing. Data duplicating. Responsibilities not so clear. People confused. As I see it, chaos is by far the small company’s most common disease. It makes sense. When you start your first entrepreneurial adventure you’re mostly alone. And who needs procedures and processes for himself?

Good news: the business survived the startup stage, has grown up and encountered success. Let’s fast forward some years and get back to today. Dozens of guys around. All of them doing something important. Everyone seems to know what to do. But if you take a closer look, there are some cracks on the wall. Some basic things are not very clear to anyone. Could sales be organized in a more effective way? How about deliveries? Do we have any formal training program for newcomers? Where’s the Crisis Management Plan? Who has access to which data? Who’s responsible for sending out parcels when the responsible person is missing for a day? Too many questions. And not so many answers. That’s why I’m in the bookstore again, to find the answers in a book.

And good news again, I’m lucky today. I have the book. It’s Paula K. Berman’s SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT – What You Need to Know to Get Results. Published in 2014, it’s brand new. But more important than that, it looks to be the stuff I came for to the virtual bookstore. It’s nicely structured, just as the business processes should be. Tells why you should or shouldn’t have business processes in your company. And they all should be part of a process system. And so on, over the 14 chapters of this delightful lecture.

Must read it now. Let’s begin the… Process!

I read lots of business books. I buy books to read and to have them. I possess those books, all kind of, including real ones made of paper, ink and so on, but also e-books, which became my favorites in the last few years. My life is somehow guided by the books. When I really need deep and profound knowledge, and in a very short time, usually I’m going to get it from a specialty book from my library. And I feel sorry about not having time to read them all. Let’s face it, life is too short to read everything and there are too many great books competing for my attention.

I educated myself to love e-books, although the paper-and-ink stuff creates a more pleasant feeling when in hand. Unfortunately that excitingly pleasant stuff is heavy, needs bookshelves and it could be lost or borrowed and never returned. On the opposite side e-books are not so pleasant to touch but you can have few dozens in your pocket via your smartphone and read them at any convenient moment of your day. I can stay, wait and have no other choice to spend my otherwise wasted time. The e-reader or tablet keeps my time usage at a very efficient level and helps me stay up to date with my business knowledge.

There’s a whole lot of book experience, from choosing the right reading to getting further than Contents or Introduction and applying somehow what you received as a reward after reading your business book.

This is what I call BOOK EXPERIENCE. In one word: BOOXPERIENCE.

When writing the word just one sentence ago, the spell check gave it a red underline. I right clicked it and selected the option: ADD TO DICTIONARY. You might want to do the same thing…

In the last 4 decades I’ve spent large amounts of money on buying books. When I say large sums, you should think to something big, really-really big, like thousands of dollars and many other currencies like pounds, forints, lei and so on. I’m not speaking only about the amounts used for paying their price. Time is money, and reading those books, even partly was not entirely for free, I spent many precious hours on digging into them, or just skimming the contents and looking for something particular. And as we all know, time is money. But if I have to conclude: was it worth it or not, I could say that books (business and all the rest) literally draw the way of my life.

Today I started to read something new (for me). The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman is one of the most interesting books I ever read about why we don’t need an MBA degree (although I hold one). Instead, the guy says, you can create your own study program, just need to get the right books to accomplish your goals. But come on folks, is this really the right way, or just another ad to make us buying books? Okay, I was joking, I believe in books and knowledge, especially when I can digest them and can use their content in my everyday life.

Want to see how it works? Read the story, as I plan to do it in the next couple of weeks, and you’ll find exactly 226 principles – which will lead your steps. The first one is about value creation. “Every successful business creates something of value.” True. If you read further you’ll understand THE IRON LAW OF MARKET, THE MERCENARY RULE, THE CRUSADER RULE, THE ITERATION CYCLE, SHADOW TESTING and so on. Yummy! Maybe they truly make the difference in the life and business. I’m going to try this in the following days. Come with me, let’s discover what’s inside, be my personal MBA classmates!

http://www.personalmba.com/