Tag Archives: business

Great Expectations

Not surprisingly with the weekend approaching, your writer’s thoughts turn to golf.  Every golfer who plays regularly should have a handicap index.  This is probably the most misunderstood statistic that golfers use.  The short explanation is that for every round one plays, you (or a computer, usually) figure out the stroke differential between what you shot and the stroke rating of the course.  You adjust that for something called the slope rating (a measure of how difficult the course is relative to other courses) and add it on to your list.  Your handicap index is 95% of the average of the ten best (lowest) adjusted stroke differentials of your last twenty rounds.  Clear?  Good, because it’s a great business lesson too.

Typical elements of a hole on a golf course: t...

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Get Off Your Butt

The hardest thing about being an independent consultant for me is business development.  Not on behalf of others, but for my practice.  It’s not that I can’t do it or that I don’t know how.  After all, I spent a good portion of my early career doing just that for ABC and CBS with excellent results.  It’s more that I’d prefer to spend my time working on my clients’ business and not on my own, I’d guess.  Maybe I need to be more selfish.

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A good friend who has been on his own for 30+ years told me early on that this would be the hardest part and that there would be anxious months with not enough work.  He was right, as usual, but the remedy is something far simpler than anti-anxiety drugs or meditation and is applicable even to those of you that live in the corporate world and is something I want to share since it goes beyond business as well.
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Filed under Helpful Hints, Reality checks

Fuzzy Strategy

Sometimes I’m convinced that the most successful businesses have no idea what they’re doing.  Oh sure, if you asked an executive about their strategy, he or she would probably give you whatever is in their planning document verbatim, but I think that’s crap.  I think they’re telling you what they believe to be the truth but in fact may only be accurate in their minds for that moment.  Instead, I think the most successful companies are masters of dealing with the utter chaos of the business world and not being too anchored to any one detail of a plan.  Yes, planning is important, but so is reality, and that often means dealing with something for which we had no plan. So why bother planning? Continue reading

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Filed under Helpful Hints, Thinking Aloud