Miscellaneous Briefs

5 Skills You Need In Business and Life

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If you want to be a successful entrepreneur or CEO, there are 5 skills you need to master:

  1. Hiring superstar employees
  2. Firing mediocre ones
  3. Managing key employees
  4. Recognizing which products to launch and which to kill
  5. Determining which advertising campaigns will work

You need roughly the same skills to succeed in your personal life:

  1. Finding friends and associates who will have a positive effect on you
  2. Distancing yourself from people who will have a negative effect on you
  3. Working consistently to improve the quality of your personal relationships
  4. Recognizing which habits and pastimes enrich you, which are wasteful, and which are self-destructive
  5. Eliminating the self-destructive habits and pastimes and gradually replacing wasteful ones with enriching ones
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Miscellaneous Briefs

How to Fix Your Business in Seven Days

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Your business is struggling. You are not sure what the problem is. Everything you look at is okay, but not great.

You have made suggestions in the past, some of which have been followed, others ignored. There has been some improvement here and there but nothing substantial. You know what it feels like when your business is in a groove. Your business is not in a groove.

What do you do?

Here’s an idea I got from John Forde, the copywriter, with some post-conversation embellishments of my own.

John’s idea is to makeover you business in seven days. John points out that there is genius in limiting the change to 7 days because it forces you to pay close attention to the most important things.

The model for the 7 day business, John suggested, are the reality shows where some expert comes into some situation – a house in need of repair, a love affair gone wrong, a hair saloon in decline – and fixes it.

I thought it would be fun to explain this idea using one such show I’ve seen and enjoy: Hell’s Kitchen – in which Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef, spends a week in a troubled restaurant and completely revamps the place in that short amount time. Then do the same thing with your business.

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