The Best Dam Business Book in the World, Vol. 1: A Fast-Read Introduction to a Twelve-Part Series

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Using the analogy of beavers building a dam, Caswell demonstrates that
there can definitely be too much of a cute idea. The concept of
comparing the development of a business to the construction of a beaver
dam is a good one, at least for a chapter or two. To sustain the analogy
for a whole book, however, is to ask for more than a reasonable amount
of patience from the reader.

Those busy little beavers are business gurus, of course, spouting
management mantras as readily as they chop down trees. Have a vision;
put the basics in place first. Know that conflict is unavoidable. Deal
with the under-the-surface problems. Teamwork pays. Respect differences
in worker types. Have one top decisionmaker and lots of junior managers.
Blaming sets the scene for not arriving at solutions. A whole pond full
of time-weary management truisms flows from the actions of these boring
little rodents.

The book is presented as the introduction to a series of 12 volumes
(the next 11 are still on the drawing board). The plan is to keep the
beavers busy in all 12 books, a concept so horrendous we can only hope
that it will prompt Canadian publishers to build a dam to stop the flow
of animal-analogy business books.