Читать книгу Small business. Big game онлайн

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From the first day of the company’s operations, my partners put me in charge of management, but I had no idea what it meant to run a company. It seemed to me that it took just a few things: agreement among partners and employees, personal competence, and personal example. But when we hired our first employees, I found that it was also necessary to allocate areas of responsibility, plan the work, and demand high quality performance.

Until then, the company had been essentially a sort of club, where everyone chose his favorite area of activity and pursued self-fulfillment in that area. And that was great! After all, if a person chooses his own area of activity, he usually acts it with the utmost responsibility. Look at how hard a person can work tending his own garden or engaging in his favorite hobby. It does not even occur to him that he may have worked too much or been paid too little for this work. When a person freely chooses the work that he is going to do, he feels really good about it and does his best. If he is forced to do something that he finds useless and unnecessary and does it under duress, he will, at the very least, be unhappy with the work. His productivity will also be very low; there is a good reason why they say that the lowest labor productivity was in slave-owning societies and prisons. Wise parents know that if they force a child to wash the dishes, that child will come to hate washing dishes more and more with each passing day and will, at best, grow up and hire himself a maid, and is at worst – is will spend his whole life with mountains of dirty dishes piled up in the kitchen. To get him a child to wash dishes on his own initiative, it is necessary first and foremost to inculcate a desire on his part to do so, to make an interesting game of it, and then the dishes will be clean and the child content, as well.