thinking/critical

Does this scenario sound familiar? You start out with three weeks of lead time, struggle and procrastinate and struggle for a week trying to figure out what to say, eventually say to your designer, “Just put something together and we’ll see how it looks,” hate the result but aren’t sure how to tell them because you know you didn’t give them good direction in the first place, redesign the ad three more times, and one day before deadline settle on something you don’t even feel good about, but it has to go or you miss your deadline.

These three ideas are so simple, yet they are profoundly effective in helping you build your business. Why? Because selling doesn’t lead to relationships, but relationships do lead to sales. And relationships are a lot more fun.

The ability to hire the best people is one of the most important, most under-rated, most misunderstood skills in the pantheon of business knowledge. Let’s take a tiny chunk out of it right now by talking about the 11 most important questions you can ask in an employment interview. With these 11 questions you are assessing the candidate’s team, decision-making, learning, and problem-solving skills, their ethics and character, self-awareness, motivation, and general outlook.

What’s wrong with using experience and observation? Experience is useful to the extent that it is relevant, but changing even one condition or assumption can render previous experience useless. Observation is far from reliable, because it is limited by both conceptual bias and limitation of sample (i.e., what one customer complains about may be something that 2,000 of them like – but the complainer gets the attention, because they are the one “observed”).

Psychological research demonstrates that, because you’ve already made the emotional commitment to the car, and because you’ve already invested so much money in it, your tendency will be to continue your commitment to the increasingly expensive car.

Have you ever been put on the spot with a question that you knew the answer to, but later kicked yourself because you didn’t express the answer well and ended up looking or feeling stupid? If you haven’t, you’re the rare person. The rest of us understand that desire-to-crawl-under-the-desk feeling. Here’s something high school and college extemporaneous speakers learn that every business person should know. It can be a real reputation-saver.

Everyone has their boxers in a twist these days over all the corruption associated with Chinese-based business and Chinese products. Of course, American business has had its fair share of run-ins with the moral police in the past seven years. But when we dig deeply into where ethics problems in business start, we end up asking, “was that person a bad apple, or were they in a bad barrel?” If we’re really honest, we might say some version of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Any pediatrician can tell you that if you pay attention to your child only when they are bad, you get a child who is bad all the time. This concept applies to business too. If we only pay attention to our low performers, our “A” performers eventually wither from lack of attention, leaving us with a business full of low and mediocre employees.

Is there anything more dangerous than getting up in the morning and having nothing to worry about, no problems to solve, no friction to heat you up? That state can be a threat to your health. If untreated, it incites an unconscious yearning for any old dumb trouble that might arouse some excitement. Acquiring problems is a fundamental human need.

Don’t guffaw now. I know very few people ever get to sit in a meeting that isn’t a complete waste of time. But ineffective meetings are one of the easiest management nightmares to fix, because the fix is 80% process and 20% willingness.