By Charlie Nichols
Sometimes you read a business book that resonates with you so well that you begin to see examples of its principles in places outside of your own workplace.
I read one such book last year and have seen evidence of its truths here in Paducah and west Kentucky. The name of the book is The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think, by Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed.
The authors researched 44 years of data on 25,000 publicly traded companies to identify what made the outliers with truly exceptional performance different. They propose three rules that underpin the strategic decisions of the most consistently successful companies they studied.
Although the book can sometimes be very in-depth and includes many accounting terms such as Return on Assets, Total Asset Utilization, Return on Sales, and Total Asset Turnover, along with many charts, the three rules they propose are interesting.
I believe they are generally true.
These three rules can be used to help us make choices about what to do or not to do in our own businesses. So, what are the three rules?
