I recently received an e-mail from my long-time car dealership (www.buddssaab.ca) announcing the exciting new (old) direction for Saab, “Spyker Chief, Victor Muller, says he can spark a similar renaissance in a Swedish brand once renowned for its innovative design and technology. ‘We’re going to be completely different to how GM dealt with Saab,’ he says. ‘It used to be a cult brand and it can be again. We don’t need to go out and find new customers – we just need to win back the ones we’ve lost,’ he says. ‘Saab customers were the most loyal and educated in the industry’. The fact that they left, means they must have been disappointed.”

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“At some point somebody has to sell something”… Let’s make it sooner! This opening line of Chapter 6 of The 90% Rule resonates that much louder during challenging times.

This point is made in the first part of the book because, all too often, successful companies become order takers. They have been wooed by the good times in which the phone would ring and now they sit and stare at it aimlessly, forgetting that, yes, it can dial out, too.

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The conflict between time and time to think always brings us to the eternal balancing act in business … balancing the short and long-term needs of the organization.

At Spyder Works, whether it’s working one-to-one to solve a client’s immediate problem or making enough time to write a book, the process we use is geared to achieving a balance that meets the immediate demands of running the day-to-day business and the need to work towards our longer-term plans.

Each business day I start by asking myself three questions:
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