SYSTEMology: Create Time, Reduce Errors and Scale Your Profits with Proven Business Systems

It is no secret that the business book market is a “red ocean” of competition where it is almost impossible to create a differentiated product. So, when I come across a business book that I know will make a huge impact to organizations, I always try to share what I have learned from the book with others.

David Jenyns book SYSTEMology is one of those books!

For business veterans, SYSTEMology will be a wake up call for what we should have done or still need to do within our business.

For those new to business leadership, SYSTEMology is a great resource that provides the background and the tools necessary to systematize your business. This systematization will decrease workloads while increasing quality, repeatability, and profitability.

Four Levels of Systematization

Jenyns defines four levels of business systematization as:

Growth IQ

Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business

The book review for this week is Growth IQ by Tiffani Bova.

Bova has written a powerful book that describes the optimal paths to business growth in today’s marketplace. She backs up her theories with excellent case studies using relevant businesses and their current levels of success and/or failure.

My takeaways from this book are the ten paths to business growth shown in the list and diagram below and the knowledge that most of these paths are not stand alone. Most business growth comes from applying a number of these paths in a strategically informed sequence. In fact, context, combination, and sequence can be the key to success!

How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Your Business

By now, most of us have heard about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Once the exclusive domain of science fiction and futuristic movies, it is now becoming prolific in many aspects of our society!

But do you understand what it is? Are you and your business prepared for AI and how are you leveraging it in your business today?

AI has been around and evolving since about 1956 and it is now advancing at a speed that is almost incomprehensible!

According to Ray Kurzweil, the speed of advancement of society today is accelerating exponentially. Furthermore, he asserts that the entire progress of the 20th century would have been achieved in only 20 years at the rate of advancement we saw in the year 2000. So, the rate of advancement in the year 2000 was 5 times as fast as the average in the entire previous century!

He believes that another 20th century’s worth of advancement happened between 2000 and 2014 and another will happen between 2014 and 2021! In a few decades after this, a 20th century’s worth of progress will take place multiple times in the same year and a decade later it will happen multiple times in the same month!

Basically, it boils down to the “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will see 1000 times the progress as the 20th century!

A big part of the changes and advancement that we will see will be both in Artificial Intelligence and made possible by Artificial Intelligence.

Current State

The diagram below comes from a webcast from Dr. Kai-Fu Lee and Peter Diamandis. They classify AI into “waves” and show the high-profile companies that are leveraging AI into the core of their business.

  • 1 – Internet AI
  • 2 – Business AI
  • 3 – Perception AI
  • 4 – Autonomous AI

The Second Machine Age

Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

This week’s book review is The Second Machine Age by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson.

The authors take us through a great history of social development and chart the relentless and accelerating progress of technology. They do a great job of explaining how technology has impacted society, is impacting society, and will impact society moving forward. Besides the technology itself, they cover the impact that the second machine age will have on politics, economics, social upheaval, income inequity, and more.

My takeaway from this book is that our future will be very different that our current world and that the rate of change is accelerating. The best way for us and our businesses to stay ahead of this change is to:

Profit First

Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine

The book review for this week is Profit First by Mike Michalowicz.

Michalowicz introduces a new and unique way of managing the financial side of your business. Rather than running your business using traditional GAAP based reporting, he introduces an approach that keeps the business owners focused on profits not on Revenue, SG&A or COGs.

His point is that profit is not an event . . . Profit must be baked into your business every day, every event, every transaction. The best way to do this is to build a system that puts profit first and not GAAP accounting (although the accounting still must happen). Michalowicz lays out a simple but powerful system that does this.