= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
tetsuo55 comments on Studying business. Rational organizations. - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (22)
This is basically my job so here goes:
Get certified for the best management practices, these have been established by years of trial and error using a simplified version of the scientific method called Plan-Do-Check-Act.
The HPO Center Has done a lot of research on why companies stay in business for a long time, and how they remain market leader. The result is 35 rules that when followed give you a higher chance of being a long lasting market leader.
Another methodology you can get certified for is Six Sigma which revolves around reducing the number of errors in your processes, this is often combined with Lean which focuses on removing those things from your process that do not add any value to the end product. These two combined ensure the customer gets a good product or service at minimal costs to you.
Finally, most of your value will be in the form of knowledge, documents, processes, etc... Companies like Knowledge Values specialize in tools and teaching surrounding the management of this knowledge.
All the idea's here combine to form a strategy and mindset for creating a company (process) that can have a high chance of success an profit with a lower investment and risk of bankruptcy. Note that the whole thing stands or falls with how willing your customers are to get your product, and how good you are at making them want it. In the topics i mentioned this issue does not get a lot of attention.
The concepts i mentioned are often used by companies to become or stay in list like the forbs500.
One final note, whenever you optimize for some metric, that metric becomes less and less reliable, this is called Goodhart's Law. The topic's above do go into this a little bit, but my main advice would be to always find 3 interconnected and if possible contradictory metrics so you see what happens to the other 2 when you optimize for one. An example:
Customers complain >> give them more money they stop complaining.
You can manage the complaint solving a little bit better by adding a cost metric in addition to the customer happiness metric. (in my case i also added a time spent by the employee metric)
It seems to me that what you say could be reformulated, with minimal change in what's learned, as "Get thee an MBA from a good school."
The overlap between the skills necessary to run an existing business with a known business model and to found one, even where the business model is known is not high. It might be as high as 50% for those cases where the model is known, but really, that's not high.
I assume the MBA's weak relation to functioning without supervision, i.e. being an executive, is obvious.
Did I miss or misintrepret what you said?
There may be schools in the world somewhere where the MBA study actually teaches you something useful, in my country there are none.
To run a business you don't need any of the above things, a training in middle management is enough.
The things i mentioned are specifically for organizing a company for the first time, or reorganizing an existing one. That's what i use these skills for (and with high success)