You want to have a better life?

You want to make more money?

You want to improve relations with your employees? 

You want to improve sales and have more customers or clients?

If I gave you the simple formula would you follow it? 

Here it is: Read a business book.  Read a trade journal.  Read the Wall Street Journal. 

I am always surprised when I suggest this to business people and they tell me they are too busy.  But yet they will spend countless hours dealing with employee problems, production problems and every other business problem imaginable.  When you identify a problem in your business or an issue you want to improve upon, someone has already written a book about it. 

We are in the age of communication.  Literally, thousands of business books are written every year.  Not to mention what’s on the internet.  Most books are 200-300 hundred pages long.  If you only read 10 pages a day every day you’ll have read one book a month, 12 books a year.  Imagine how much more business knowledge you will have.  If you don’t want to read those 10 pages per day listen to audio versions of books during your daily drive time.  Another option is to subscribe to condensed versions of books.  You can research sources for both audio and condensed book editions online.

You’ll also want to spend 30 minutes to an hour per day on the internet researching up-to-the minute information on business.  If you just do these few things you will be well ahead of your competitors. 

There are many factors that go into making a successful business – good fortune, timing, good economic conditions.  But the one aspect that puts you ahead of everyone else is business knowledge.  In the old days you had to learn by trial and error.  Today there is such a vast amount of information on business that just by reading you can begin to eliminate mistakes that are costly and expensive.  So the next time someone asks you if you’ve read any good books lately, you can say, “yes!”

PS: If you have a favorite business book, send a comment and let me know its title/author and why you found the book to be especially helpful to you in business.