Why is Tom uniquely qualified to write this book?

In the course of Tom’s 27-year stint in corporate America, he had countless opportunities to observe the inner workings of several of America’s largest and most prestigious corporations. He was able to see how business was done on a daily basis. The good and, unfortunately, much of the bad. Out of these observations patterns arose. It is these patterns, observed, gathered, and retained over years of immersion in the business world, which were the genesis for What Not to Do in Business.

It is said that one definition of insanity could be given as “repeating something over and over again, yet expecting different results.” Well, if that is the case, then given the sad state of American business today, it does appear that many companies are truly insane.

This is not, however, because people are stupid. In fact, intelligence alone is almost irrelevant to this effect. It is rather due to the fact that, although businesses are legally entities amongst themselves, businesses are all run on a daily basis by people. And, unchecked and unmanaged, human nature is not directly conducive to business success.

We simply are people first, and businesspeople second.

We must learn to curb our tendency to react rather than respond. We must learn to curb our desire to lead with our emotions, rather than execute on what the data tells us.  We must learn to fight the urge to practice What Not to Do. This book is designed to help you do just that.

As an engineer, Tom has spent his entire life fixing problems. He has devoted his career to the analysis of, and effective solution to, complicated problems of all types. His keen sense of observation has served him well in his work, and provided unique side effects. One such side effect is the ability to distil all types of seemingly complicated issues down to their base level components, to categorize them, and to organize them into similar types to come up with the simplest and most direct answer. This makes Tom a fantastic engineer. It also makes him a great manager and director of other engineers.

This capability, learned over a career spanning nearly three decades, quite coincidentally makes Tom Berarducci uniquely qualified to write this book. For it is this keen sense of observation, categorization, and organization of information that has provided the tools for Tom to gather up all the learnings from observing years of failed management techniques.

This book is the culmination of those learnings.