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You are here: Home / Archives for 5 - Industries

What Christians Can Learn from Secular Business Thinking: My Article in Christianity Today

May 19, 2015 by Matt Perman

As a companion piece with the article on Jon Acuff, I wrote an article for Christianity Today on why Christians need to be learning from secular business thinkers.

More and more Christians have been learning from secular business thinkers over the last few years. I think this is a really good thing. What I seek to do in the article is lay out a brief case for why this is a good thing — something you don’t hear articulated much.

I also highlight two of the most important trends in the best business thinking that we can especially learn from as Christians.

Some Christians are hesitant to learn from business thinking. I think in most of those situations what is happening is that bad business thinking is being confused for the whole of business thinking. 

In other words, there is certainly bad business thinking out there. Some Christians have rightly critiqued that and said “this doesn’t belong in the church.” I agree — it doesn’t. But not all business thinking is like that. There is also good business thinking that is based in principles of character and respect for the individual. This business thinking is something we can — and must — learn from.

Often, those who have critiqued bad business thinking haven’t realized that they’ve only encountered one strain of business thinking. By then implying that all business thinking is like that, they close us off from learning the lessons that we really do need to learn and apply in the church.

We need to move past that and redeem good business thinking. Even more, when we do that we can also stop giving bad business practices a “pass” by saying “that’s just business.” No, it’s not. Business is required to seek the good of the other person just as much as every other area of life. That is the guiding principle of all good business thinking, and that’s why we can indeed learn from it in the church.

So take a look, and if you have any thoughts, let me know what you think.

 

Filed Under: Business, Common Grace, Work

The Gospel-Centered Business

March 17, 2015 by Matt Perman

From Tim Keller and Katherine Leary Alsdorf’s Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work:

The gospel-centered business would have a discernible vision for serving the customer in some unique way, a lack of adversarial relationships and exploitation, an extremely strong emphasis on excellence and product quality, and an ethical environment that goes ‘all the way down’ to the bottom of the organizational chart and to the realities of daily behavior, even when high ethics mean a loss of margin.

In the business animated by the gospel worldview, profit is simply one of many important bottom lines.

Keller nails it here. It is also very interesting that his statement that profit should be only one of many bottom lines syncs up with the research of Jim Collins. In the landmark book Built to Last, Collins’ research shows that the most profitable companies actually don’t put profit first — they put the customer and the mission first.

This doesn’t mean they don’t seek profit (just as Keller isn’t saying not to seek profit). Rather, it’s that they realize that profit is not the point. Making a contribution and serving the customer is. You have to do this in a profitable way, but ironically, Collins’ research shows, you will be more profitable when you pursue more than profit rather than just profit. 

And so here we see that the nature of a gospel-centered business is very much in line with what the best business research is showing as well. Common grace and the gospel are allies, not opponents.

Filed Under: Business Philosophy

Writing Good Business Documents

January 15, 2015 by Matt Perman

These are notes I took several years ago over something I read on writing good business documents. I can’t recall what I had read, but these notes have always been helpful.

 

General principles for proposals, memos, letters, and reports.

“Organization is the key writing principle. If you organize your documents well, you almost surely will have successful documents–even if you violate other writing principles….The ideas presented in a document should be structured in a natural but emphatic sequence that conveys the most important information to readers at the most critical times.”

Beginning Principles

1. The document should announce its organizational scheme and stick to it.

2. The ideas in the document must be clear and sensible, and comprehensible, given the readers.

3. The document should conform to the readers’ sense of what the most important points are and of how those points are arranged.

Main Principles

1. Organize information according to your readers’ needs. Consider their perspective and what they need to know, then order it so that the most pertinent goes at the beginning.

2. Group similar ideas. If you separate similar ideas, you create chaos.

3. Place your most important ideas first. Lead from major ideas, not to major ideas. This is not a science paper. If you lead to, you will provide unnecessary detail and be hard to follow. The strongest part of a document is the beginning, by virtue of its position. So begin with the most important ideas, and then support them afterward.

– The scientific format. If you are writing a scientific paper, then you do lead to. This process is only acceptible if the readers will be as interested in the process of arriving at the conclusions as they are in the conclusions themsleves (in business, this is typically not the case–people are busy, and the point is not exegesis). In some scientific reports, therefore, this scheme is used: Abstract, summary, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion (Fact 1, Fact 2, Fact 3, therefore), conclusions, recommendations (optional), summary (optional).

– The managerial format. Follow in all dcouments except sicentific documents written for scientific peers. It is the reverse of the scientific format. A desirable format is: Summary/Executive summary, introduction, conclusions (and recommendations), (because of) [Fact 1, Fact 2, Fact 3, Fact 4], results and discussion. Having the conclusion early in the report facilitates reading becasue the reader is given a perspective from which to understand the facts and data being presented.

Note: The principle of emphasis through placement extends to all documents and all sections of documents. Most important ideas should appear at beginning of the documents and of individual sections. The most important idea in most paragraphs should appear in the opening sentence. The most important words in a sentence typically come at the beginning of the sentence.

Note 2: A corrolary of this is that you should always subordinate detail. Place it in the middle of sentences, paragraphs, sections, and documents. Detail includes data, explanation, elaboration, description, analysis, results, etc.

Note 3: In lengthy documents, begin and end with important ideas.

4. Keep your setups short. Do not delay your major ideas any longer than is necessary. Do make sure to set up negative information well.

5. List items in descending order of importance.

6. In most business or technical documents, preview your most important ideas and your major content areas, and reveiw (summarize) major points at the end of sections.

7. Discuss items in the same order in which you introduce them.

8. Use headings, transitions, key words, and paragraph openings to provide cues to the documents organization.

9. Other. Most effective letters or memos should have a clearly identified action (a to-do statement). If no to-do, then needs to begin with a to-know statement. Title/subject line should reflect the to-do or to-know statement. The repitition between the to-do statement and title/subject line is deliberate.

Filed Under: Business

How Google Works

January 7, 2015 by Matt Perman

An excellent summary of the best principles for making organizations effective today by Eric Schmidt,  executive chairman at Google. And here’s his book, How Google Works.

How Google Works from Eric Schmidt

Filed Under: Business Philosophy

Self-Preservation: The Biggest Obstacle to Making Customers Happy

August 19, 2014 by Matt Perman

Gary Vaynerchuk starts his book The Thank You Economy in a way that illustrates this truth perfectly:

I’ve been living the Thank You Economy since a day sometime around 1995, when a customer came into my dad’s liquor store and said, “I just bought a bottle of Lindemans Chardonnay for $5.99, but I got your $4.99 coupon in the mail. Can you honor it? I’ve got the receipt.”

The store manager working the floor at the time replied, “No.”

I looked up from where I was on my knees dusting the shelves and saw the guy’s eyes widen as he said, “Are you serious?”

The manager said, “No, no. You have to buy more to get it at $4.99.”

As the man left, I went over to the manager and said, “That guy will need come back.”

I was wrong about that; he did come back. He came back a couple of months later — to tell us he would never shop with us again.

Now, I wasn’t any nicer than this manager, nor have I ever been a softie when it comes to business. However, though I was young and still had a lot to learn, I knew deep in my gut that he had made the wrong call.

The manager believed he was protecting the store from a customer trying to take advantage of it; all I could see was that we had missed an opportunity to make a customer happy.

Filed Under: Business

The Right Use of Analytics in Social Media — It's Not What You May Think

December 3, 2013 by Matt Perman

Analytics are important and helpful, but they are a minor-league detail, not a major-league detail. The numbers can almost never tell you what is most important, and easily hide the fact that some of the most important interactions may result from smaller avenues that a bare look at the statistics would have told you to kill.

This is very, very well said by Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the best social media experts around, in his excellent book Crush It!: Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion:

I use analytics very rarely and I urge you not to rely too much on them either, especially if you’ve got good business instincts.

A lot of times the stats and percentages related to my business just don’t support what my instinct says is true, and I’ll trust my instincts over numbers every time. What if your analytics tell you that you’ve only had seven views on Break.com in two months? Are you going to stop posting to that platform? The data are telling you that you should probably drop it, but what you don’t know is that one of those seven viewers is a producer for The Today Show. There’s no reason to think that can’t happen.

The numbers can be a trap that changes your behavior. People see they’ve only gotten fifty viewers in a few weeks and decide they suck and they stop trying as hard. Or their video catches on and gets watched a thousand times and they think they’ve made it, and they stop trying as hard. Metrics can be useful, of course, but the effect of your online interactions and the excitement building toward your brand isn’t accurately reflected by the number of viewers you have.

It’s not about how many viewers you have, it’s about how passionate they are. If you must use them, analytics should be a minor-league detail. Focus the majority of your attention on your overall brand positioning.

Filed Under: Social Media

Physical Books May Offer Better Reading Comprehension than Ebooks

November 7, 2013 by Matt Perman

This has been my experience, and it’s good to hear that science may be bearing this out. Here’s a key quote from a brief article on this subject:

“Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects—a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols,” writes Carr. “The physical presence of the printed pages, and the ability to flip back and forth through them, turns out to be important to the mind’s ability to navigate written works, particularly lengthy and complicated ones. We quickly develop a mental map of the contents of a printed text, as if its argument or story were a voyage unfolding through space. If you’ve ever picked up a book that you read long ago and discovered that your hands were able to locate a particular passage quickly, you’ve experienced this phenomenon.”

The question for me is whether there’s a way to be able to replicate this phenomena with e-books. I haven’t found one yet, but perhaps there is.

Filed Under: Publishing, Reading

Business: A Sequel to the Parable of the Good Samaritan

November 1, 2013 by Matt Perman

My post today for The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics.

Here’s the beginning:

When we think of the parable of the Good Samaritan, we tend to think of the importance of charity and giving to those in need. That is one of the chief points Jesus is making. But is it possible that the parable might have something to say about work and business as well?

A Sequel to the Good Samaritan

We are all familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man is going down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and falls among robbers. Two religious people see him and pass by, but a Samaritan stops to help (and, it might be added, helps him generously and holistically).

One of the main lessons is: your neighbor is anyone in need. Now, go about the world looking to meet needs, treating others the way you would want them to treat you.

With this in mind, in his book Generous Justice, Tim Keller encourages us to consider a “sequel” to the parable. Imagine that the next day the Samaritan is traveling the road again, and comes across another person bleeding on the side of the road. A few weeks later, this happens again. And then again.

As it turns out, every time he makes the trip from Jerusalem to Jericho, he comes across another person laying in the road. Then he looks up, and sees hundreds of people likewise lying along the road, beaten and robbed. What should he do?

See the whole thing.

Filed Under: Business, Economics

The 5 Characteristics of Ideas that Spread

October 16, 2013 by Matt Perman

A great article at the 99U. The five characteristics are:

  1. Relative advantage
  2. Compatibility
  3. Complexity
  4. Trialability
  5. Observability

Read the whole thing.

And for those who want to go deeper on how ideas spread, I would recommend:

  1. Unleashing the Ideavirus, by Seth Godin (a classic and still the best).
  2. PyroMarketing: The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life, which you need to read carefully in order to truly get, but adds important details not in Godin’s book. It’s by Greg Stielstra, who oversaw marketing for numerous best sellers at Zondervan, including The Purpose Driven Life, and clearly knows what he is talking about.

Filed Under: Marketing, Publishing

How Smart Phones Will Revolutionize the Future of Medicine

April 30, 2013 by Matt Perman

Wow.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here’s the intro:

One of the world’s top physicians, Dr. Eric Topol, has a prescription that could improve your family’s health and make medical care cheaper. The cardiologist claims that the key is the smartphone. Topol has become the foremost expert in the exploding field of wireless medicine.

Here’s a link to the video in case it doesn’t show up for you.

And here’s his book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care:

(HT: Matt Heerema)

Filed Under: Health Care

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What’s Best Next exists to help you achieve greater impact with your time and energy — and in a gospel-centered way.

We help you do work that changes the world. We believe this is possible when you reflect the gospel in your work. So here you’ll find resources and training to help you lead, create, and get things done. To do work that matters, and do it better — for the glory of God and flourishing of society.

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About Matt Perman

Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

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3 Questions on Productivity
How to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day
Productivity is Really About Good Works
Management in Light of the Supremacy of God
The Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards in Categories
Business: A Sequel to the Parable of the Good Samaritan
How Do You Love Your Neighbor at Work?

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