I don’t quite mean what you might think by the headline above. I don’t mean writing the book about farmers FOR farmers. I mean writing it to inspire, encourage and empower other business owners and managers across the country.
It’s a thought that comes to me almost every time I sit down to write this column, which I normally do just as we’re pushing the files out the door for the printer.
Check it out for yourself. Take a spin through the business books on the Chapters or Amazon sites. Better yet, restrict yourself to their best sellers. Or best of all, wander through the business section at your nearest Chapters. (It won’t take long. And you’d better hurry or it may not take any time at all!)
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The books you’ll see will often fall into two categories. (Yes, I know there are technical books too, but that’s not what I want to talk about.)
The first are the memoir-like offerings from successful business leaders, like the top execs at Fortune 500 companies. You’ll find them chock full of personal stories about their management challenges and experiences, plus the stories of allies and rivals who they’ve crossed paths with.
The second category come from Harvard, Wharton or other business professors, and they’ll be chock full of stories too, although this time they’re more likely to be organized as case studies.
To those outside the business world (and to many inside it), such books can seem a self-indulgence with little or no application, but when you talk to readers, you’ll find that they — like you — are interested in what business leaders think, and how they identify the strategies they want to pursue, and then put wheels under them.
It’s like the question we asked when we decided to make Country Guide into more of a business book for farmers. Agriculture is an amazingly diverse industry, with enormous differences in crops, regions, farm types and more. We had to ask, is it possible to write about a grain farm in southeast Saskatchewan in a way that is helpful to an irrigation farm in southern Alberta or a hog farm in Ontario?
It turns out you can, as long as you get the best possible writers. In fact, you can do it not only because the challenges of HR, tax management, and expansion are, at a strategic level, quite similar, but also because different farms need to be driven by minds with the same attributes, including passion, commitment, innovative thinking, and a deep understanding of value.
I’ll write more about this next issue, but for now, I’d like to leave you thinking of what it would look like if that Chapters shelf was stocked with covers bearing the kinds of faces you see in every issue of Country Guide.
Between now and next time, then, take a minute and let me know what you think. I’m at [email protected]. Are we getting it right?
