TEN SIMPLE WAYS TO MESS UP YOUR BUSINESS
Preparing for a presentation last week to a group of entrepreneurs, I started thinking about how many ways there are for businesses to go bad. I found that there are probably more ways to messup a business than to get it right. Here are a few ideas:
- To manage a business well, identify a market need, mull over it, talk about the opportunity with others, do nothing and watch someone else step in and make a killing. Then wonder why you never get lucky breaks that everyone else does.
- To keep customers happy, promise them what you think they need without making the effort to find out what they really need and blame luck when business goes bad. Then wonder why the customersare not taking the product you made to meet their needs.
- To compete with the best in class, avoid them as much as you can because they make you look bad, refuse to compete with them because you don’t want to lose, drop off and join a class with a lower standard where you are the best. Then wonder why you are not improving.
- To improve your skills, try to avoid tough challenges, ponder over things that can be done in a ‘smart’ way with less effort and lower your standards subsequently. Then wonder why you are not making it to the top bracket.
- To handle a real tough challenge, start with a weak and tentative desire, weaken it further with constant doubt, imagine ways that you could fail, scare yourself further and slowly give up the challenge. Then wonder what you could have done to achieve your big goals.
- To achieve success, put in minimal effort, fail, give up and find something else quickly because if you try longer and fail, it will be admitting failure. Then wonder why you are not successful at anything.
- To prevent failure, throw everything away after losing including the valuable lesson it came wrapped in and repeat the same mistake again and again. Then wonder why you keep failing.
- To deal effectively with pending work, allow it to pile up, fret a lot, distract yourself with unimportant things, feel pressured, fret some more and then give up. Then wonder why nothing gets done and why the pending work never ends.
- To make work interesting, wait for it to become exciting on its own, get bored when it does not, stop doing it, look for someone to liven up the work for you, get bored again, give up and fare badly as a result of all the bored work. Then wonder why work is so boring.
- To enable faster learning in the team, retain all power to yourself, restrict information sharing and prevent team members from correcting one another because you don’t trust their ability to do so. Then wonder why the team is not developing fast enough.
This above list is not intended to depress you. It is meant to inspire you by encouraging you to acknowledge your mistakes and start fixing them. After all, mistakes are opportunities waiting to be seized.
