There’s Got to Be an Easier Way to Run a Business

Hospitality Masters Press 2001, 170 pp, $14.95 (paperback)

Want to know how to be more effective with less effort? Of course you do, and Marvin wrote this book to show you how. Billed as a “politically incorrect” approach to efficient management, it advocates such counter-intuitive concepts as why managers should not waste their time trying to motivate their staffs and why helpful things you do for others may actually perpetuate problems.

Touchy-feely it’s not...
On the other hand—and this is a great virtue in any management book—it is very well written, and while reading it one can easily imagine Marvin hamming his way through the text in a live seminar setting. He has a way with punchy lines and short anecdotes that illustrate his points. Some are trite but many are certainly worth reading, if only to provide a counterweight to conventional thinking.

For example, in one of his chapters he draws a parallel between a server refusing to substitute a salad for fries in a lunch combo plate, and the manager refusing to make a lastminute work schedule substitution to accommodate a worker. He shows how the basis of the thinking—what he calls the PDAs or Pre-Determined Assumptions—are almost identical in both cases, and the manager’s attitude tends to reinforce the worker’s attitude in the similar situation.

Simplistic? Perhaps, but did you ever consider it that way before? Probably, not many managers have.

Technically, Marvin wrote this book for commercial business managers, but his primary template is restaurant management, making it more of a fit for onsite foodservice environments.