No one bad decision can cripple your business.
No matter how big the problem is you can solve it.
It won't take you down.
That's just not how business works.
Call it the principle of the second chance. You always get a second chance, until you don't...
What usually determines if you get that second chance is the little decisions you've made along the way.
So what does cripple business?
If making a mistake won't put you out of business why are so many companies struggling? And why are the experts so eager to get you to use a new "seven step" program?
It's because the little decisions matter most.
- The decision to keep paying the bills late and alienate your vendors.
- The decision to not make hard decisions and "let this one ride".
- The decision to make a scene out of employees' honest mistake rather than mentoring in private.
- The decision to spend free cash flow on trendy issues that can only be solved with time and passion.
- The decision to hire for experience rather than training and cultivating passionate workers internally.
- The decision to ignore criticism and excuse away problems rather than using feedback as a learning experience.
- The decision to care less about attitude and more about immediate actions.
- The decision to stop working so hard - and "think about it".
It's the small decisions that eventually cripple high-performance.
It's bad decision bankruptcy.
Just like credit card debt and a bad spending habit you follow one small bad decision with another small bad decision. Day after day. Moment after moment.
You make decisions that undermine everything you have ever worked for.
If you trace backwards from business failure you'll find a series of small decisions that didn't seem to matter at the time. A series of bad decisions that no one thought to re-examine. No one cared about.
Until the damage is already done.
When you really start thinking about it you realize that the small decisions matter more than the big ones.
There's more of them to manage. And usually you focus less on getting them right the first time.
But if you want to avoid bad decision bankruptcy, you'll have to get good at making sure you've examined the decisions you think don't really matter anyways.
They might someday.