Want to Read a Book on Growing Your Business? Think again
You’ve finally started your business…
The single, most crucial thing now is advancement. You want to develop all the time and stay away from any pitfalls, barriers, not to talk about the dark shadow of bankruptcy.
There are many books that promise to teach you how to grow a successful business. Well, there are quite a few troubles with books, namely :
a) Most of them have very little or none evidence to confirm the value of the content Most of the theories they feature can be simply thoughts of the creator.
Let’s say you’re interested in learning more on free people search. The evidence whether a specific people search engine works is easy to measure, compared to something like whether a specific psychological method works
b) The information supporting authors claims are often questionable. The authors are human beings as well and subjects to so-called ‘cognitive biases’. Other than that, experts, like any one of us can be subjected to ‘cognitive biases’. A cognitive bias is a error that people will make over and over again, until they get aware of it and purposely change the behavioral pattern. Even after they get aware of it, they might need some systematic approach in order to consistently avoid making that mistake.
For example, the ‘confirmation bias’ says that we tend to be very biased toward ideas/evidence that confirms our beliefs and perception of the world. We fail to consider enough alternatives and contradicting ideas which might be emotionally difficult to grasp in the short run, but will give us much more balanced view in the long run.
A good example many business book critics cite…
is the book ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins. In one chapter, he says that all great companies are ‘hedgehogs’. But are all ‘hedgehog’ companies great companies? I don’t think so, in a era when win-win-win business model is proven to be much more financially rewarding and trust gaining.
This is also an example of a selective bias, when you take a ‘sample’ that only confirms your views. This can be seen in scientific group as well. You must take a diverse sample if you want your study to be meaningful.
c) Books change your aim to fancy things, when in reality you should work on getting strong basis.
I am a big believer that the third Newton’s law is a fundamental principle of success in business. Think I’m going overboard with this ? Let me explain.
The third Newton’s law states, that every action is followed and accompanied by response. Action and reaction are interdependent. You take action, you get a specific reaction. Simple. In the world of business, you don’t accurately know what action leads to what. Therefore, i believe, it’s best to make as many actions as possible, observe and learn. Practice is the best teacher. When you see, which reaction produces the desirable outcome, take more action!
Let’s look at AdSense for example. If you want to be prosperous with AdSense, try out as many key phrases as you can and try to figure out, which combination gives the greatest CTR/profits. When after a day or two you will find your profitable set of keywords, concentrate on them (thanks gomu003 for suggestions). You can, of course, learn from other people experience on the web. But that’s free.
As for business books, perhaps some of them are fine. But remember – you should not believe that golden pigs can fly, unless you have a good proof for it.
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