Fire Your Relatives. Scare Your Employees. And Stop Whining.

Sounds to me like this guy has created a fantastically shitty place to work, and an equally shitty company to do business with. You can't get away with abusive behavior towards employees and vendors and expect to keep the good ones around - anyone that's worth the money has far too many options to put up with cheapskate asshats like this. If you treat everyone like shit, don't act surprised when only shitty people continue to work with you.

When a client starts dicking around with payments for work already provided and doesn't have a really good reason (yes, occasionally things happen and it's okay to be a little flexible if you're convinced it's on the level), my rate for future work doubles, and if that means that projects go elsewhere, so be it. Fighting over payments is possibly the most unpleasant aspect of providing services to companies, and I'd generally rather pass up the work than get into those fights.

Don't follow this guy's example - you're not important enough to afford to be this abusive, and frankly, neither is he.

This article almost reads like a list of stuff NOT to do, in my opinion.

Of course, I am more of the "build something lasting, and of quality, and get on with your life" school than the "money over everything I'm going to die here at work" type.

I would not want to work for, with, against, near, or around this guy. He advocates CHEATING his vendors, to force them to basically give you money. Well, I suppose it would only be fair to not pay his company, right?

Anyone else have any feelings other than general disgust at the idea of working with this guy?

First, I have to acknowledge the points I agree with. You do have to love your business, and you do have to have systems for tracking the correct financial measurements (backwards and forwards).

But I have to wonder if, at some point before he drops dead in his office, George will realise the connection between treating your vendors as interest-free loans and staff as unlikeable, and his experience that "Getting good people is 100 times more difficult than conventional wisdom says".

About half way through, I was thinking I'd like to read a debate between him and Tim Ferriss. Then:

"Q. What do you think of “The 4-Hour Workweek” [a best-selling book by Timothy Ferriss]?

A. Oh, forget it. I haven’t even read it yet. I don’t want to die of laughter."

Of course, this is also a man who:

"I semi-retired for about five years and that was probably something I won’t do again. They’re going to carry me out of here in my shoes."

Meanwhile, Tim Ferriss is traveling the world, not thinking much about money, learning languages, winning dance and fighting competitions, etc. If I were a small business owner, Ferriss' end results would appeal to me much more.

This was also a classic exchange:

"Q. You say, “Love your business more than your family.” What does your wife think of that?

...

Q. How many times have you been married?

A. This is my third marriage."

No comment necessary.

I'm surprised how negative most of the comments here are. The guy's views are a bit extreme, but in my experience there is a lot of truth to what he's saying. In a perfect world you'll have brilliant, self-driven employees; you can give them great conditions and direction, collect status reports once a week, and everything will get done. In a real world this is nearly impossible - most smart people are not self-driven, if you give them good conditions they'll sit around and browse the web all day. Think how much this applies to most of us! Unless there is uncertainty and a reasonable degree of pressure, most people won't perform well. Employees that are smart and self-driven are one in million, there aren't nearly enough of them for thousands of businesses in America.

I once worked for a guy who sounded like this. I can say he was absolutely brilliant and I learned a tremendous amount from him.

And at the first opportunity to come along that was marginally better, I jumped ship and took it.

This is insidious: whether intentionally or not, this guy is spouting stuff that validates and reinforces the unfounded beliefs of many (going back many centuries) that people who meet with success deserve it and people who are dealt failure must have done something wrong. Anyone who wants to believe that that's the case will latch onto this guy and say, "see? SEE?"

Unhelpful. Inevitable, probably, but unhelpful.

> One guy that worked for me for 10 years wrote, “If I fell dead at my desk, George wouldn’t notice for two days.”

This isn't good management. This is neglect. As manager, you should be on top of everything.

His tough guy stance moved from being somewhat intriguing to laughable once I got to his comments about family and the subsequent admission of being married three times. The guy is not without his points, but he's definitely overstepped himself I think.

His rules for supplier credit fail the basic rule of reciprocity, unless he also extends 45 days credit to his customers, which I doubt.

I don't think most small-business owners are really like this, fortunately. It'd be a pretty sad world if it were really true that "profits aren't everything, they're the only thing".

Sounds like a dick who thinks being hard means he'll succeed.

"You have to work on stretching your payables because every dollar you get in extended payables is an interest-free loan"

Wouldn't it be better to simply ask for more money up front, rather than creating a shitty relationship by trying to stealthily extract more money through interest? I think trust between business partners is worth a lot, and not paying bills on time is not good for building trust.

I love how this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116881 is also on the front page just a few entries up.

I imagine that these two men are so diametrically opposed that if they ever came into direct contact with each other, they'd instantaneously cease to exist!

If this is the American Management Services I remember from years ago, they were a standard DC-area government contractor. Having once worked for one such, I have to think that running AMS is not quite the same thing as running a company that produces something other than billable hours.

This advice probably works just fine for a chain of fast food restaurants, or discount clothing stores, but not a business where good people are required. Judging by his website, he's already scared away good graphic design help.

He's just trying to drum up sales for his book. Most people are smart enough to know better than to take his advice to heart.

I hear this guy is in the short list for the Ebenezer Scrooge award.

In war it's called a scorched earth policy.

This guy is totally sad and horrible.

The first half of the article is mostly OK advice out of the guy -- it was the reporter who made the outrageous summaries like "cheat your vendors", and the "micromanagement" part didn't seem micromanagey as much as it seemed to mean "stay informed" -- but the end is just terrible. Loving work more than family is seriously one of the worst ideas ever.

Man has no children, third wife, is old and will work until he dies. What kind of life is that? This article is very sad, and I hope everyone immediately recognizes its cruelty and myopy and disregards it.

Kudos to interviewer Kermit Pattison for letting this penny ante Gordon Gekko speak so clearly in his own words.

This is actually a good lesson in marketing. Everything he says recasts the situation in terms of a problem that management consulting can fix with simple solutions.

It's not the recession, it's poor salesmanship. A problem that can be solved by a consultant. A massive pan-industry collapse in sales, inventory, credit, and utilization could not be fixed by three ring binders and training classes.

Lack of vendor financing. A problem that can be solved by a consultant tightening the screws, backed up by a long list of companies that were helped. This is survivor bias. The successes are selected for companies whose vendors are idiotic enough to finance their customers AND lucky enough to survive the folly. It also relies on the presence of other parties who are willing to buy mis-rated bonds and do factoring (loaning against small business receivables). Both of these are being choked off, and may well come to an apocalyptic end as the financial collapse continues. Whereupon all his "saved" clients will blow up.

"Getting good people is 100 times more difficult than conventional wisdom says. The fact is, you’re going to deal with a lot of mediocre people, no matter how hard you try." In other words, your employees are sabotaging your company, because all employees do this. The only solution is new management policies.

Fear is the best motivator. Soliders have a word for leaders like this. Fragged.

Stop whining? When this guy stops posturing.