If You Want to Develop a Big, Sustainable Business…

You Must Become Knowledgeable in Two Ways 

In business, as, in life, there are two kinds of knowledge: specific and general.

Specific knowledge pertains to the hundreds of particular things you need to understand to run your business – from how to place advertisements to how to process orders to the financial, operational, and management details that must be done to get things done.

General knowledge pertains to things like how to find and groom great employees, how to develop longstanding relationships with vendors, how to come up with new marketing ideas, how to boost company morale, etc.

Growing a business requires both kinds of knowledge. You need industry-specific knowledge to make the dozens of smaller decisions that arise every day. But you also need general knowledge to guide you in the bigger, longer-term decisions.

Young entrepreneurs, because they are young, have only a modicum of general knowledge. But they can – and the successful ones do – have a great deal of specific knowledge. Particularly the specifics about marketing and sales.

But as the business grows and layers of management are added, it becomes impossible for the founder/entrepreneur/CEO to have all the industry-specific knowledge he needs to run it. He must delegate it to people that he trusts.

And that is where general business knowledge comes into play. Delegating is easy. Trusting can be, too. But unless the CEO has a good deal of general knowledge, his trust will be blind. And his ability to lead his key executives will be nil.