Faster Company : Building the World's Nuttiest, Turn-on-a-Dime, Home-Grown, Billion-Dollar Business

"I don t care what business you re in. I don t care where you are in an organization. If you get a chance to put these principles into action, you will wind up with a department, a business unit, or a company in which people reach levels of performance they never thought possible and you ll all have one great time doing it." Patrick Kelly. How do you take a tiny start up in a humdrum business and turn it into a fast track, billion dollar industry leader? Patrick Kelly knows how because he lived it. In this smart, funny, and inspiring book, he tells you his secrets. And what secrets they are! Kelly s company, PSS/World Medical, Inc. is like no company you ve ever seen. Employees fire their bosses. Truck drivers carry business cards with "CEO" on them. Leaders there are no "managers" at PSS are required to read Dostoyevsky and Plato. PSS s culture is so dynamic and yet so crazy that one bewildered observer dubbed it "a cross between the U.S. Marines and Animal House." Behind the nuttiness, though, is a rock solid, high performance business a company that knows how to provide customers with value they just can t get anywhere else, and that racks up annual growth rates of 50% and more, year after year. Only 15 years old, PSS today is the unchallenged leader in distributing supplies to doctors offices, and is already diversifying successfully into other branches of the medical supply industry. It s a powerful model of business success, with lessons for companies of any size and in any industry. But more than an account of brilliant business st rategies and tactical coups, Faster Company is also Kelly s own inspiring rags to riches story. With the flair of a born storyteller, he relates his astonishing life history: how he spent his childhood in an orphanage, how he made it to college and promptly flunked out, how he was sent to Vietnam, and how he went on to build an incredibly successful career his way. At the same time, he teaches valuable lessons: in entrepreneurship, in bringing out the best in all of your people, and in creating a company in which everyone works hard, has a great time, makes a ton of money, and leaves competitors wondering what hit them.