Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

"Be Honest With Yourself"

A great temptation of any business owner or manager is to hear only what they want to hear and disregard the rest. This alone can be one of the greatest enemies to business success.

There's nothing worse and more damaging than surrounding ourselves with people that will tell us what we want to hear. While there's nothing wrong with hearing good news, on the other side there's nothing wrong with hearing bad news either. Good or bad news are just another way of saying something in our business is being measured.

This can be through customer responses gone public, expenses, sales and employee retention, among many other things.

We must learn to create a culture of honesty. That starts with ourselves. We need to utterly know who we are realistically, and measure ourselves accurately to be able to spread that across our organizations.

When I talk about honesty here, I'm not talking about telling the truth, which is important, but not the subject. We're talking about assessing things from an honest perspective; to see things as they are, not how we wish them to be.

If we see things as they are, it is from there that we can bring them to where he want them to be. To create a scenario about the present that doesn't exist, is to misunderstand what we need to do to bring the future we want to create through our businesses.

If we're honest with ourselves, it will filter throughout the company as we encourage others to do the same and lead by example in that way. We need to be a business that understands where they're truly at, while believing from that reality we can bring it to where we want it to be. To pretend it's somewhere else in the present does more harm than good. We've got a word for that today: denial. It's the worst place to be in for ourselves and our business.

Warren Buffett has one of the more healthy views of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A), as he knows and recognizes exactly where the business is today. He understands that past performance doesn't guarantee future performance, and that there is always a need to look at the business in an honest manner. It starts with himself.

Other Buffett Resources:

Company growth

“Everybody Else is Doing it”

MSU students have special visit with billionaire Warren Buffett

WARREN BUFFETT PHILOSOPHY II

Sticking to what you know  Core businesses

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