Hi. By “process-coding,” I mean working out the processes in your business, like customer service, sales, marketing, other operations, etc., to such detail that nothing can go to chance.

I ask this because that’s what the “E-Myth revisited” is writing, and while on some level the perfectionist inside me agrees with it—customers like consistent quality, failure is a hard price to pay, etc.—I’m always sceptical of writers pursuing their own agenda, i.e. making things look a lot harder so that they can offer future consulting-services.

As Fidji Simo wrote in her review before, Gerber suggests treating your business as a franchise, coding everything possible to make it easy to scale and delegate tasks. While it’s entirely logical to me, he wrote and researched this book in the 70s-90s, not only the era of McDonalds, Starbucks, and Disney (of which at least two today have lost a lot of personality because of exactly that uniform attitude to doing business), but also perhaps before the era of global business diversity, meaning that the “American way” of doing business may no longer be as universally applicable.

So the question stands:

• How applicable are Gerber’s lessons to your business today, and
• is there alternative (international) thinking out there, in the form of books or, preferably, business-cases?

Vincent

P.S. since Toyota is probably one of my favourite companies today, I may already have part of the answer.

P.S. 2: On a personal note, I have to say that the conversationlist writing-styles of both Micheal Gerber’s book, “E-myth…,” and the book “One Minute Manager,” get on my nerves after a while. Maybe this is an American thing, but the constant dialogues ending with “Oh, Mr. Gerber, you’re so wise!” and “Oh, Mr. One Minute Manager, you’re so smart!” are way too sugary for my taste… even though, on many levels, both books give great advice and do so in an easily digestible package.

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