Do Business Well

A healthy partnership is based on one crucial understanding: Neither partner is perfect. If potential partners are afraid to admit their imperfections, or are trying diligently to correct them, or are reluctant to ask for help, neither will be on the lookout for a productive partnership. They will be nervous of confessing to too many faults and suspicious of anyone who offers.

Strangely, most companies actively encourage this kind of behavior. Job descriptions, for even the simplest roles, run to two or three pages, presumably in hopes of capturing every minute task that the perfect incumbent should be able to perform. Training classes and development plans target those few behaviors where you consistently struggle. Everyone talks of the need to “broaden your skill set.” Continue Reading »

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Maximizing and actualizing the potential ofeveryone and everything around you.

The ultimate human tragedy

There is nothing more common in this world than wasted talent. Every day, talented people trudge through life being less than they can be. They are miserable, bored, unfulfilled and frustrated. They know that there must be more to their life but they just can’t seem to find the path to a better one. Maybe it’s because they’re not really looking.

Or maybe it’s because they’ve given up. Or maybe it’s because they don’t believe there is a better way. Continue Reading »

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If “Your Own Business” is a game, you have to play the game against somebody. And unless you’re Eskom, you’re going to have competition. And your competition is going to be good and it’s going to keep getting better. So how competitive are you? How powerful is your desire to win?

Winning the game of “Your Own Business” means that you have to constantly track the competition, know what they’re doing, do what they do better, and beat them to the customer. At the same time, winning this game means not being reactive to the competition. It means constantly leading the competition and doing things they haven’t even dreamed of doing. Continue Reading »

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Suddenly, the old crowd was back. When he asked why they had not come a few kilometres down the road to Morningside, they all said it was too far.

In Australia, Thomas Cook had a busy office at the north end of Bankstown Shopping Centre. One day I analysed the postal codes of its clients and found they all came from the north — they drove into the shopping centre from that point, shopped at that end of the shopping centre and drove away.

If Thomas Cook had put in offices on the south, east and west sides they would have quadrupled their business.

The Mars Bar people found the same thing in New York. The city blocks are big enough to have multiple, multi-purpose corner stores, and analysis showed that different corner outlets sold different sweets, depending on the socio-economic standing of the people coming the quickest way down their ‘animal tracks’ for their newspapers, magazines, croissants, sweets and household goods. Continue Reading »

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