Today, I'd like to turn our attention to an area of management often overlooked in
traditional management courses: small-business management.
Small businesses have gone from being traditional small-town stores selling food or
clothing to sophisticated, high-tech enterprises.
And in addition to the important products they produce, they create jobs for lots of
people because there are so many of them.
Writing a business plan that everyone in the organization understands and follows will
help to provide the necessary focus and direction.
It's important to state clearly what the purpose of the business is.
Now, if for some reasons a business plan doesn't work, try hard to discover why not, rewrite
it, and immediately focus on the new plan.
A word of caution, however, never give up a bad plan without replacing it.
A business has to have a plan because it can't afford to waste its limited resources. And, as
you know, waste leads to unnecessarily high production costs.
Production costs are at the heart of the company's ability to make a high-quality product and
sell it at an affordable price.