The Contrarian Approach to Business

If you look around the business world, we see that most entrepreneurs are struggling, and feel frustrated at the relatively poor results they get from the considerable effort they put into running established businesses. They are also unable to resolve the animosity and tension between their functional managers, although everyone is apparently working together to achieve the same objective. This is because virtually all established businesses today are run using a common approach - the Popular Approach to Business - which is fundamentally flawed. The Popular Approach to Business promotes a lot of accepted business practices which are dead wrong - like having multiple objectives in business, managing every function for maximum efficiency, growing at an accelerated pace during boom times, taking excessive market share, encouraging resource inflexibility, taking bank loans, being satisfied with mediocre ROCE and much, much more!A few smart entrepreneurs have achieved unprecedented success by switching to the low risk Contrarian Approach to Business which is based on counter intuitive ideas like having a primary objective for business, managing only the critical function for efficiency, managing non-critical functions to support the efficiency of the critical function, growing at a steady pace during boom times and recessions, limiting market share, encouraging resource flexibility, avoiding bank loans and aiming for a very high ROCE. In this book, Tiny Philip first re-defines what it means to be successful in business and examines how the best companies in India measure up to this new definition of success. He then proceeds to outline the 3 underlying principles of the Popular Approach that drive virtually all established businesses today. Next, Tiny logically examines the flaws in the Popular Approach, and then proposes the much simpler and low-risk Contrarian Approach to Business which enables entrepreneurs to achieve success systematically. No matter how big or small your company, or what industry you are in, I believe that you will find the concepts in this book relevant and practical.