5 Children’s Books that taught me about business

9 May 2014

Books tend to give you an introspective journey, and teach you lessons. I’ve compiled some business lessons that I learnt through children’s books and applied with OpenCRM!

The Lorax:

The Lorax, if you have yet to read it, is about a character who decides to create a wonderful product, but in doing so, annihilates his environment and the ecosystem around him. I think business ecosystems are just as important to a company as our world ecosystem to our survival. In OpenCRM you can carefully curate your ecosystem, by keeping your data clean and organised. You can switch on Auto-De-Duplication so that you can be alerted if a duplicate record is created.
Lesson: In the long run, we can’t survive if we don’t take care of our environments.

Clifford the big red dog :

Clifford, is a widely popular kids book in North America about an oversized, actually, giant dog who befriends a little girl and learns lots of valuable lessons. The lessons i have learned thanks to Clifford is to go the extra mile. In business you need to keep your contacts and prospects close, to make them feel important, because they are! With OpenCRM you can set up some auto emails, for thank you’s, reminds for when someone’s birthday is, or even a “we haven’t spoken in a while, let’s keep in touch” email. You can do all that an more, and it will help keep your contacts and prospects happy. And you’ll feel pretty great too.
Lesson: Being Big is about being Big-Hearted. It’s about having a Big Spirit.

The hungry catepilar:

This is probably my all time favourite kids book. The metaphor behind the caterpillar is clear: change, growth, evolution. I think it fits in perfectly with one of my favourite quotes from our MD: “Evolution over Revolution”. I shamelessly re-use that quote whenever i can because i truly believe in it. OpenCRM, is a very deep very broad product you can grow with. When you want to change CRM products and fall in love with us, you don’t need to revolutionise the way you work. Learn, grow and evolve with us, along side us.
Lesson: Life is full of changes. Don’t be afraid of change, embrace it.

Everyone poops: 

For anyone interested in purchasing this book in the UK, the already translated title, is Everyone Poos. This Japanese book was one of my brothers favourites ( I’ll let your guess why), and it’s essentially plot-less. It teaches children to not fear natural animal and human behaviour. That “these things happen”. So what does that make me learn through business? Everyone has a way of doing things, but usually, the same things are done. It just a matter of trying to normalise, or create a method around it. OpenCRM is the perfect tool to help you create standards and processes in your company and can help you implement them with ease. I dare you to pick up the phone and call one of our sales team, they’ll show you!
Lesson: No one is perfect; we’re all human.

The little engine that could:

Another one of my favourites. This is an inspiration tale of a, you guessed it, little engine that could. It teaches us that with motivation and guidance, tasks that seem insurmountable can be conquered! Our project managers can be the ones to help you go form 0 to 60 with your CRM project, that can seem daunting at times. Have faith in them, they’ll show you the way!
Lesson: leaders will instil confidence in trying times.

Those are my top 5, what are you favourite books? What have you learned from them? Give us a call, we’d love to hear them!