“I will tell you how to become rich. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”

Closing a sale requires two contradictory human qualities: the empathy to understand what the customer is saying; and the ego to reach for their wallet. It is rare to find people who have these qualities in the right balance. Some are too empathetic, and so cannot ask for the money. Others are too greedy and don’t spend enough time listening. Every problem around closing tends to come down to this issue.

We are stuck now, not only in the United States but in many European countries, in a polarized polemic in which pundits and politicians alike suggest to us that the essential question of political economy is one of choosing between planning and laissez-faire, between Stalin and Ayn Rand, between stupidity and intelligence. This is as specious as it is dangerous. The encouragement and regulation of economic life has been a mainstay of civilization since the dawn of written history. There have been periods of dogmatic laissez-faire before, though never on the scale we have experimented with since the 1980s, and it must be said, they have tended to end in famine, bankruptcies, and social unrest. Governmental interventions can of course create much mischief, but they have also nurtured practically every economic miracle we know of, from the commercial revolution in Renaissance Italy to the nineteenth-century USA to South Korea in the 1960s and contemporary China. This does not mean that governments always know what they are doing, far from it, but it does indicate that our debates should be over what sort of interventions and what level of regulation is appropriate in a given context rather than whether regulation itself is a moral good or evil.

Don't wait for perfection, praise progress.

In business, we tend to spend a lot more time thinking about the problems than the triumphs. People need to know that what they’re doing is making a difference, and that their leaders notice and appreciate their efforts.

If someone comes up with a great idea—or even an idea—we should start at yes, and work through every reason why we can't do it. We never start at no.

Instead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity. ...the new economics of personal productivity mean that the better organized we try to become, the more wasteful and inefficient we become. We'll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn't to organize ourselves better; it's to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It's not that we're becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it's that we haven't become dependent enough.

Unless employees truly understand the issues [that affect the business] and make a meaningful connection between their jobs and those issues, their attitudes and behaviors will not change. To achieve engagement, three things have to happen: The business issue has to mean something to the employee personally, the employee has to understand the issue (and I mean truly understand it, not just read about why it is an issue), and most important, each employee must be made to feel a part of the change process.

The concept of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) sprung from the shortcomings of Value Based Management (VBM). This approach does not take into consideration the relative change between risk dynamic and the dynamic of value. Forgetting this type of analysis led in the past to instances of a very satisfactory and high increase in value, even though the company went bankrupt. Therefore, in the business environment, we have to estimate the value-to-risk ratio to determine if the company condition is improving or deteriorating. To make it real and decline the default risk, a new approach to company risk management has to be assumed, which can be summarized as Enterprise Risk Management (ERM).

There are several specific approaches to ERM because it is very much related to the individual business context of any enterprise, therefore each business has to find an individual “suit.” Enterprise Risk Management can be defined as an integrated and holistic approach to credit risk, market risk, operational risk, business risk, and economic capital management. This includes risk control, mitigation, and risk transfer to maximize value of the company. Successful ERM implementation takes a long time and requires engagement of all the managers within the company. ERM requires advanced tools and analytical methods as well as some different approaches to managerial accounting when reflecting financial results on the balance sheet

Given today’s volatile environment, the overall focus for planning must move away from precise forecasting and toward more strategic, top-down ambition-setting that is validated with bottom-up business insight. This approach should be tied to contingency plans in case the targets cannot be met—and complemented by more frequent short-term forecasts of key metrics. However, embracing unpredictability and encouraging entrepreneurship within reasonable limits entails a significant shift in the management culture of many large corporations.