The Three Business Tenets You Need to Know

General rules of business can be found in nearly any business book.  General rules range from people management,  customer services, how to run a meeting, product development, to everything in between.  These rules are, well, general.  More valid in one instance that in another.  There will always be exceptions.        

However, there are a basic set of rules that are always true. These higher order immutable tenets are relevant no matter the business situation.  

1. If you are not growing you are dying.

• Nothing happens until somebody sells something.  Somebody better be selling something every day.
• If you are standing still the competition is gaining on you.  Andy Grove was right, "Only the paranoid survive."  So, move forward.  New products, new services, new process, new pricing.  Move forward

2. It's all about people. 

• Hire people smarter than you.
• Give them the tools they need.
• Give them commander's intent.
• Get out of their way.
• Learn what EQ is.  Read Daniel Goleman's books.  Working With Emotional Intelligence is a good one. 

"But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job."

Daniel Goleman

3. Everything is a system,

• The results you are getting are the perfect result of that system.  If you are getting shitty results you have a shitty system.  You need to change the system.  
• Peter Senge wrote a damn good book on this, The Fifth Discipline.  You should read it. 

• Then you should learn the tools to evaluate and understand systems.  Tools like Lean Thinking, Six Sigma, kaizen, just to name a three.  

“Business and human endeavors are systems…we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.” 

Peter M. Senge

 And that is it.  Everything else is lower down on the pyramid. 

 Coda 

A general tenet of life being true for more than just business is this: Show up every day.  You may not be at your all-time best but you can be at your best for that day.  It surprises me how many times I see people phoning it in.  You can do better than that.