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30 Business Sense Revelations: How to Succeed in Business
Some people naturally succeed at work, but others need more insights.
Posted August 16, 2021 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
Key points
- Basic principles can help people succeed in business, such as cultivating relationships, skillsets, and truly understanding a product or service.
- Business sense is an underdeveloped mental capacity rarely formally taught but acquired over time from successes and failures.
- Remote work and technology have changed the power structure of day-to-day business affairs.
Most people don't take work that seriously because, for them, it's just a job and not a mission.
The business sense learning curve is steep, especially straight out of school where feedback is contiguous. In real life, feedback is haphazard, rarely knowing where you stand. Here are 30 tips about business sense.
#1: The number one tip is to know what you are selling if that is a product or service. If you are selling a product, you are not selling a car, but the capacity for a greater sense of freedom and comfort. If you are selling a service, be educated, profit from mistakes, and know that some people will be dissatisfied no matter what you do.
#2: No one is born with a business sense—it is acquired through formal education, seasoned experience, observational learning, and vicarious conditioning. A business sense is considered a creative capacity of the individual in relationship to organizational needs and goals. This sense, based on your world of work, evolves over time. It takes at least six months to accommodate the culture and norms of a new job. Lay low the first month, and observe the flow of the day.
#3: Think about the "office as if an anthropologist observing primitives, or space aliens, and where you fit or don't, especially if the person who hired you moves on, and you are left hanging, especially if you replace someone everyone liked.
#4: Your resume gains you the position, but your interpersonal relationships and listening skills keep you in the position.
#5: Remote work changes the corporate culture in unknown ways, evolving. You really can't know or trust someone with whom you have only communicated via the screen. The greater the human proximity, the faster trust is established or not, but social hierarchies face-to-face are different than social hierarchies established in cyberspace via screen life.
#6: Businesses fail because the people who own and operate them don't fully account for human factors and individual and organizational psychology. Poor performance is tolerated. Average is extraordinary. The work ethic, "An honest day's work for an honest day's pay," is considered old-fashioned in more quarters.
#7: Every age contains a new, dominant functional literacy. Make sure you are up on the latest trends, often earned through "certifications." The Master's degree used to achieve this, but tasks are too heterogeneous now.
#8: The average person now has seven careers in 40 years. Sorry, no more gold watches. The times change, thus what you need to know to survive and adapt. Every age has a functional literacy: During the Industrial Revolution (automation), the 3R's (and muscles) got you a good job for life whereas today cultural, moral, computer, internet, "smarts" and common sense gain you employment, and you still have to remain current.
#9: The role of all business, depending upon the political-economic system, is to persuade, influence, and modify behavior. Advertising makes people aware a product exists. Marketing creates an emotional bond. Don't confuse the two.
#10: The best way to determine if an employee is essential is to determine what happens if they don't show up to work without notice. If a worker is more trouble than there are worth, sit them down and give them one more chance before reading them the riot act.
#11: An ideal manager instills knowledge, responsibility, and authority, until which point they should be theoretically out of a job.
#12: Give raises based on performance (merit) instead of time on the job (longevity). The deadwood usually resists this type of performance distinction. Whenever possible, promote from within, and make sure the other employees know why, as something to emulate. This all rarely happens for union and other social issue reasons.
#13: There is nothing more destructive to company morale than airing dirty laundry in an inappropriate forum. There is nothing more instructive about morale than an empty suggestion box and nothing more illuminating than one that is overflowing.
#14: Everyone in a company should have a specified role, function, purpose, and track. Whoever appraises you, you then should appraise as well, as poetic justice, as a way to keep people on their toes, and as a tit for tat.
#15: A valuable employee learns how to make things happen, takes advantage of new contacts and how to disseminate information, and provides opportunities for those less known to grow and develop.
#16: It is hard to assess if a candidate is right for the position based on a small sample: the job interview(s). The interview time frame is a non-representative sample overly influenced by appearance and other non-essential attributes. Trained experts in human performance dynamics have trouble assessing and predicting human behavior.
The old saying is, "If you want to hire a typist, give a typing test," and chose the one who performed the best. All other measures are unreliable, invalid, and worthless. However, if you are to be around a person eight hours a day for years, and the best typist or assistant has a bad attitude, who needs that? How you come across matters.
#17: The Peter Principle is promoting a person to an area of ultimate incompetence based on extraordinary competence in other areas. However, if a person is excellent in their work, why promote them to a position where new skillsets are involved, forcing them to eventually fail? But this happens all the time. Instead, give a large raise or a new title.
#18: Technology makes fools of us all. It is impossible to remain current in high technology. Workers are made to feel inept or stupid as to which button to click, or the user interface is poorly designed to guarantee problems. Be friends with the tech people.
#19: Human resources are best conceived as a moral imperative rather than an afterthought or necessary evil or a coerced compliance to government regulation. Too often HR becomes an arm of power by an abusive CEO.
#20: Make the place of business a place people want to live the best years of their lives. The absolute worst management style is micromanagement. People hate being observed and, inferred, distrusted. Reward constructive input, no matter in what form it takes, and ignore destructive input until it expires to constructive input.
#21: Respect an employee's personal life. Don't get involved in matters that don't concern you.
#22: Everyone has their price, meaning compensation, if possible, should be tailored to individual differences, social history, and life cycle stages. In capitalism, this is impossible given cultural norms making special forms of compensation seem discriminatory to others when it is the best solution to that one person based on social engineering.
#23: A family business has different rules of growth and expansion than a non-family business. In therapy, this is a dual relationship. A father has to choose who gets a raise: the son or daughter, then all hell breaks loose, even if the business decision is correct.
#24: Social recognition works wonders to establish loyalty. At the end of the day, work-life relationships are mostly transactional. Once your title changes, no one returns your calls. Instead, link your self-esteem to good character and not job performance or authority. Always catch workers being good, and make sure they are aware of your honest interest.
#25: Someone has to be in charge and accept responsibility for success and failure. Management should be able to perform all the tasks they manage. Who you are is different than what you do for a living.
#26: Encourage off-the-wall ideas, AKA "lateral qualitative reasoning." Groupthink can work for and against productive change.
#27: Perks and jerks are highly correlated. Think of some personal examples within your company.
#28: Buy the products you make at the store, use them, and see if you like them and if you don't like them, do something about it.
#29: You'll eventually know all of this at 60, but by then, you may have burnt out or stare at the clock at 1 p.m.
#30: No one could pass an essay test 10 years after graduating college. Modern work is skillset task-oriented. Your knowledge of Homer and Aristotle is interesting but not useful at work. However, college charges $70K a year knowing this is true, so something has to change.
