jt

Negotiation

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When running a business well, a key element to smooth operations is negotiating well. I once interned at a pretty big ad agency that philosophically didn’t believe in negotiating. Their belief was that you should propose your best offer initially so the buyer gets a simple yes-or-no choice, saving both parties time and frustration. The idea was that this approach would be substantially more efficient.

I don’t disagree with that approach, but I think it’s quite easy to lack awareness of essential details. Given that, I’m a big proponent of checklists, in order to help ensure both parties are talking about the same thing.

Assessing Risk

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When you’re running your own business, assessing risk is one of the most important elements. As part of that, you need to have sound judgement and skills related to description. Describing things clearly leads to judging circumstances well leads to measuring risks well. They are all parts of a whole.

Adaptation

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In order to successfully run a business, you need several related skills. In general, you need to read well an adapt quickly. The 21st century—and computers, in general—are awash in words: descriptions, summaries, labels, etc. They are everywhere. And, like, you need them; you do. But sometimes you sure gotta read through a lot of irrelevant stuff to get to the part that pertains to you.

Ok, so: reading, writing, arithmetic 😜 But it’s kinda true. You need to be able to do all of those and quickly. You gotta be able to estimate well so that you can do things more efficiently. And it’s not just numbers—which country is that person from? That probably determines which language they speak, along with many other cultural attributes.

I often say “Play jazz!” in frustration. Jazz is oriented around improvisation, and being able to improvise well is extremely useful in life and in business. Although you will often need to adapt, you’ll likely not get a clear message regarding how. Instead, you will need to be perceptive and quickly determine and apply an approach. The better and faster you can do this, the better results you can realize.