Tag Archive for 'Business'

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Top 10 Reasons To Love Small Business

Published on February 17, 2004 in Business. 0 Comments Tags: .

The Office of Advocacy of the SBA offers these top 10 reasons to love small business, the heart of the American economy:

  1. Small businesses make up more than 99.7% of all employers.

  2. Small businesses create more than 50 percent of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
  3. Small patenting firms produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.
  4. The 22.9 million small businesses in the United States are located in virtually every neighborhood.
  5. Small businesses employ about 50 percent of all private sector workers.
  6. Home-based businesses account for 53 percent of all small businesses.
  7. Small businesses make up 97 percent of exporters and produce 29 percent of all export value.
  8. Small businesses with employees start-up at a rate of over 500,000 per year.
  9. Four years after start-up, half of all small businesses with employees remain open.
  10. The latest figures show that small businesses create 75 percent of the net new jobs in our economy.

Project Managing Business Management

Published on January 21, 2004 in Business and Project. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Last night I went to a meeting of the Northeast Ohio Chapter of the Project Management Institute. Every year in January, we have the Kerzner Award Dinner Meeting, with a presentation of the Kerzner Award. Dr. Kerzner is the preeminent project manager and we are lucky that he lives, teaches and works in NE Ohio. If your interested in PM, you need to hear him speak or read any of his great texts.

During his presentation of Advanced Project Management: Best Practices on Implementation, my ears perked up a couple of items, but one statement in particular was great to hear.

“Businesses should be run as a project.”

I agree 100%. The trinity of project management–cost, quality and time– is the same concern or goal in business….of any type. It is becoming evident that as businesses and the corporate environment (legal, financial, HR, marketing and the rest) become more complex, business managers are turning to project management to provide a systematic methodology. You do not have to be building a factory or developing an ERP package to be using project management best practices. The methodology works in developing new products, establishing new offices, mergers & acquisitions, process re-engineering and every process needed in managing a business. Perhaps soon we will see a “BMBOK, the Business Management Body of Knowledge,” or just make the PMBOK, the Project Management Body of Knowledge required reading for managers and executives.