The BusinessFitness Blog
Thoughts on topics to help you make more of your business…
Performance You Don’t Have to Push
"Visibility is a trap." – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975) Two Businesses, One Set of Numbers Two businesses close the month with very similar results. Same margin, same customer retention, same...
What a Business Buyer Would Actually Pay For
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." – George Orwell, from the essay In Front of Your Nose, published in Tribune, 22 March 1946. Across a boardroom table, an owner is talking a...
Why Effort and Results Drift Apart
"It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?" – Henry David Thoreau, letter to H. G. O. Blake, 16 November 1857 The Second Late Friday It's the second Friday running that...
When Revenue Grows and Value Doesn’t
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." – William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking (1963) A business closes...
Resilience as a Leadership Capability
"I am tempted to declare that whatever doctrine the Armed Forces are working on, they have got it wrong. I am also tempted to declare that it does not matter that they have got it wrong. What does matter is their...
The Risks That Don’t Show Up in the Numbers
"Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting...
What an Audit Cannot See
"Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so." – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., "Natural Law", Harvard Law Review, Volume 32, 1918 The board pack looked the way it...
When Everyone Knows the Risks
"...the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant." – Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1970) A leadership team sits down to a board pack that looks exactly...
When Structure and Systems Stop Helping
"There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." – Peter Drucker, “Managing for Business Effectiveness”, Harvard Business Review (1963) A founder I'd...
When Better Tools Create More Work
"Men have become the tools of their tools." – Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), "Economy" A founder I was speaking with had spent nearly a year choosing the right business system. He had researched it...
What Changes When AI Becomes Part of the Organisation
"The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge." — Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (1983) A founder I know...
When Automation Works and the Business Doesn’t Change
"The more eagerly a man struggles to reach it, the further he departs from it if he takes the wrong road; for, since this leads in the opposite direction, his very swiftness carries him all the further away." – Seneca,...