Review of "Scaling Up How a Few Companies Make It… And Why the Rest Don’t" Instaread summary

Review of

Scaling Up How a Few Companies Make It… And Why the Rest Don’t by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, Instaread summary

Five stars

Some obvious key takeways, the author did the job and convinced me that I do not need to read the book

 In many ways the most important information in this summary is in the last two pages that describe the author’s style and the author’s background. Harnish is a business consultant whose company “Gazelles,” specializes in growing businesses. The point is made that Harnish is very positive (nothing wrong with that) but that the book sometimes sounds like a set of testimonials for “Gazelles.” That is a key point as one of the most frustrating things that authors of business self-help books can do is to  make it about themselves.

 There also appears to be little or nothing in the book about how one makes the decision to expand, for there are businesses where expansion is just not a good idea. As is stated in the summary, Harnish has very little advice for the company that should not expand. There seems to be a bit of an internal contradiction in the author’s style section where the content is described as positive and uplifting rather than of deep content and that the writing is bland.

I found the book content as described by the key summaries to be useful, albeit a bit obvious. The Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC) of takeaway 8 is a fancy acronym for cash flow. No one with a grounding in business needs to be reminded of the need to manage that aspect. Key takeaway 6 is an emphasis on Profit Per X, in other words how much do you make in profit per whatever unit you sell. Again, a fancy way of saying “profit margin.” Key takeaway 9 is little more than a link to the One-Page Strategic Plan.

 Any well done summary of a book should convince the reader that they should or should not read the complete book. In this case, the author of the summary did their job, I emerged convinced that I should not read it. 

This book was made available for free for review purposes