Anal-retentives unite!
By Edie Tolchin
Have you found an easy path to wealth and success, or are you working 60+ hour workweeks with no light at the end of the tunnel?
If you are burnt out and seek guidance for creating a more organized enterprise that practically runs itself, author and businessman Sam Carpenter believes he has the answer.
It comes, according to him, in the form of his book, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less.
Despite making for dense reading at times, Work the System earned Best Non-fiction book of 2009 at the New York Book Festival and was a finalist in the Business Management and Leadership category for the National Best Books 2009 Awards.
What is your business style? Are you like that Deal or No Deal guy with obsessive-compulsive disorder, thriving on creating lists to systematize your company’s procedures? Or are you on the verge of a nervous breakdown because you just can’t find enough hours in the day to handle all the pressures involved in a new business? Perhaps you are somewhere in the middle, but feel you just need some guidance.
Carpenter has been at the helm of Centratel, which he calls the “highest-quality telephone answering service in the United States,” for 15 years. Then came a point about 10 years ago when stress levels and 80-hour workweeks, along with single-parenting, mounting bills, “fire-killing” and continually playing “Whack-a-Mole” peaked. Providence or divine intervention provided him with a revelation.
He began to organize himself physically, personally and professionally.
“I changed my viewpoint…I created a personal written plan… (and) once things got better, I continued to perform stress-reducing action items on a regular basis,” he states in the book.
Carpenter’s framework for Work the System is an exhaustive sequence of lists and sub-lists, and then some. For example, to succeed one must prepare documentation such as a Strategic Objective, a list of General Operating Principles, and then yet another list of Working Procedures.
Carpenter provides a series of appendices at the end of the book that give the actual Strategic Objectives. There are 30 of them. Yes, 30. He even has an appendix of “Procedure for Procedures.” Whew!
Unless you’re naturally OCD-inclined, you may have to retrain yourself to successfully follow his directives.
But his laborious system seems to work him. For the past 10 years, Carpenter claims he drastically reduced his work week at Centratel. Employees who follow his system, he says, are the most efficient, highly-paid and happy.
Sounds like it takes a lot of work to reduce your work. But for those who enjoy process and procedures, this system may be a good bet.
A Q-and-A with the author
Q: Tell us a bit about your impetus for writing Work the System.
Carpenter: It was originally a manual for my staff and I expanded it into a book.
Q: Our readers are inventors and entrepreneurs, each hoping their new products will take off sooner than later. Many will need to form a business. What steps can they take to better organize and help create sanity in the process?
Q: See Page 9:
1. Documentation: Creating written goals, principles, and processes that are guidelines for action and decision making. This is the one-time heavy lifting. It won’t take long.
2. Separation, dissection, and repair of systems: The satisfying process of exposing, analyzing, and then perfecting personal, work, and relationship systems. This effort includes creating new systems from scratch as well as eliminating those that are unnecessary or are holding you back.
3. Ongoing maintenance of systems: Greasing the wheels. This is easy because the positive tangible results of the Work the System method are motivating. Because it’s obvious the systems you create and maintain are doing more and more of your regular daily work, you will continue to make adjustments in order to keep them working at peak efficiency.
Q: How can Work the System help our readers?
Carpenter: It will help them get efficient as they break their company down into pieces and fix the pieces one at a time
Q: Any final advice for our readers? Why should they buy your book?
Carpenter: See the back of the book. “There will be a mechanical adjustment in the way you see your world. When this profound shift occurs, systems methodology will make irrefutable sense, and your work and life will never be the same.”
Available at www.workthesystem.com, amazon.com, and barnesandnoble.com
Editor’s note: This article appears in the March 2010 print edition.
