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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At a recent keynote address, I found myself asking attendees if they noticed the one thing that all of the athletes at the winter Olympics had in common, “ A coach.”

It is amazing how many growing companies do not have a support system (formal or informal) in place to support the founders, owners and C-suite. Why is it that we expect ourselves to have all of the answers when world leaders in performance (athletes and businesspeople) regularly have advisors to turn to in the form of individual coaches or formalized boards of advisors or directors.
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