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I have no financial interest in the success of Bag The Elephant by Steve Kaplan. I have never met Steve nor John E. Peppers, the former P&G Chairman and CEO who wrote the forward.

Few books allow for the techniques of big business to be translated into scaleable tools and tactics, equally applicable to big and small businesses. When I come across books that transcend scale, I tell as many people as will listen or read my ideas.

I am a former Senior Vice President, Brand Strategy Director for BBDO Atlanta, working on Cingular with a half-billion-dollar advertising budget. Many people mistakenly think that this experience naturally lends itself to helping a local small business--few business skills transcend such disparity in scale.

What's applicable to a business of any size? Strategy and attitude. Bag The Elephant is about strategic thinking and a successful business attitude, elements Steve Kaplan points out are inseparable. Most books on attitude lack the strategic thinking to fortify a sustainable positive attitude. If you're the captain of the Titanic and you're on the deck as it's sinking, I guess the best thing is to keep your humor and smile. However, it is a whole lot easier to laugh that afternoon if the previous night you had decided to go slowly and avoid the icebergs. But, avoiding icebergs isn't enough to run a successful business; you need passengers for your financial journey.

When I share what I've learned from Bag The Elephant with friends, some explain that they don't need a book on sales techniques to win big clients. These folks explain that they're too busy with making this quarter's nut to change their overall sales strategy right now. But, maybe they'll read this book next quarter.

Bag The Elephant isn't about sales techniques for landing bigger clients. Yes, some specific tactics to that end are in the book. What I found was that Bag The Elephant is about approaching your business from a perspective that is systemically different from the way I see most people approach business.

I gave my copy of Bag The Elephant to my friend Rich Goidel who runs a five-person shop called Media Firma. Within a week he realized a $3,000 profit specifically attributable to reading this book. Why? He didn't learn a phrase that helped him close a deal; he was looking at his client's business differently, which helped him ask a question about his client's business. Increasing your sales isn't about becoming a better salesman, it’s about becoming a better businessman, and that's what will be rewarded monetarily.

Seeing business differently will yield sustainable changes in effectiveness. This is mental synergy. Synergy, that business buzzword too often abused in meetings. R. Buckminster Fuller coined the word "synergy". The definition was 1700 pages long and contained in two books: Synergetics and Synergetics II. The shorthand of synergy is "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," but that doesn't always equal increased productivity. Synergy is about an internal restructuring where the new whole was unpredictable by looking at the original parts.

Bag The Elephant takes what you already know and helps you restructure these ideas. Perhaps my favorite aspect of this book is that Steve Kaplan doesn't use business buzzwords like synergy.

Ben Mack--
Recover Ad Executive;
Novelist: Poker Without Cards--
http://www.PokerWithoutCards.com