No One Ever Told Us That: Money and Life Lessons for Young Adults

CHAPTER TEN

PLAN FOR THE WORST CASE, NOT THE BEST, IN BUSINESS AND IN LIFE

It's difficult to try to make decisions with your brain and not your heart or stomach. Planning anything seems to go with the same thing: optimistic projections, somewhat pie-in-the-sky, best case on into the future. I see dozens of business plans a year from people eager to start new ventures and asking my advice about them. And I'm not in the deal business. Partly because all new ventures involve meetings. I cannot stand meetings. So much time is wasted on participants making sure they chime in with their own meanderings just to go on record as saying something, to show they're awake. Is this too cynical for you? I've been going to meetings for more than 50 years, and the only ones I found valuable were the ones that taught me something I never knew before. Such as the time the chairman of our board described in detail what it was like to do business with Saudi Arabia. I came away from that meeting thinking that nothing has changed in thousands of years in the Middle East and that stripping all the nonsense away, it's all about power … and money, and thinking that the sand is softer in the country next door.

As an aside to this planning chapter, avoid corporate clichés, such as going forward or break down the silos, wherever possible. These expressions are only signs of lack of original corporate thinking. The latest corporate-speak I've heard, on a trip to Manhattan, was, “I don't have enough bandwidth ...