Faster Company: Building the World's Nuttiest, Turn-On-A-Dime Home-Grown Billion-Dollar Business Paperback - 1998

From the rear cover

Praise for Faster Company "What a ride! Pat Kelly's story is amazing and his business lessons are invaluable. If you want to build a great company, read this book! If you want to inspire a youngster, give him or her this book. It could change their life." -Alen "Ace" Greenberg, Chairman of Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. "Faster Company is a quick and easy read full of simple but sound advice about the real basics of business. Few business books have much to say about how to 'run the store'; Pat Kelly knows and Faster Company delivers." -Robert L. Crandall, Chairman and CEO, AMR Corp./American Airlines "As someone who has built companies from the ground up, I believe this book offers a formula that really words...trusting in good people, giving them equity in the business, outworking the competition and having fun on the road to meeting your goals. An excellent book by an outstanding individual." -H. Wayne Huizenga, Chairman, Republic Industries "Faster company is fast-paced, fun, entertaining, inspiring, and incredibly insightful....You won't put this book down!" -William Farley, Chairman and CEO, Fruit of the Loom, Inc. All of the author's proceeds from this book will be donated to the Boys Home Foundation.

From the jacket flap

"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.

Media reviews

Citations

• Publishers Weekly, 03/16/1998, Page 47