What not to do

After he sold his business to Hasbro, serial entrepreneur John Osher decided to make a list of the 16 mistakes he'd made or seen other entrepreneurs make in business.  It has since been expanded to 17 and he added 5 things you must do to succeed.  It has become a case study used in the standard curriculum at Harvard Business School.  When I found it and read it recently in this Entrepreneur.com article, I thought that many of the points, like so many ideas in good management textbooks, were either obvious or common sense.  However, in the heat of the battle, when you are under fire from all sides, sometimes you miss the obvious.  It is worth taking a few minutes out of the busy schedule to remind yourself of these things.  The important ones for me were:

"Mistake 11: Accepting that it's "not possible" too easily rather than finding a way"

"Mistake 12: Focusing too much on sales volume and company size rather than profit."

 

"Mistake 15: Lacking clarity of your long-term aim and business purpose."

Particularly this last one of clarity.  Sometimes the objectives you set for the business can take over from your objectives for starting the business in the first place. 

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