​Many simple lessons culled from others can mean success for you in Business Management 101. Here are a few:
 

1. When you spend time developing your one-year or five-year strategic plan or goals, trot out your previous plans and change the dates since it will save time and headaches. Once prepared, it will likely be filed away to never see the light of day again, so don’t waste your precious energy on it.
2. Ignore problems until they solve themselves. Though I’m not a big believer in this one, I have a good friend who swears it works.

He used it when he managed teams and when he was directed to finish projects by his bosses. In whichever case he applied this tool, he found that people would forget or just not follow up. So, the problem effectively “solved itself.”
 
Though I don’t find that heartening and don’t believe problems “solve themselves” (they tend to crop up elsewhere), he swears by this technique, so feel free to give it a go.

1. Hire self-motivated people. It is useless to hire lazy loads. Now, the question remains how to determine when someone is self-motivated. When you figure that out, let the rest of us know, and we’ll add that as lesson number 4.
2. When you don’t know how to proceed, simplify the process. You’ve probably never seen this done if you’ve been in a business environment for over five years because so many people in positions of authority like to talk in big words that no one understands. They string together lengthy sentences that mean nothing. Watch as coworkers’ eyes glaze over. Smile to yourself. If you write something simply and understandable your teammates can easily execute and succeed. But, SHHHHHHH, don’t let on that it’s better to keep things short and simple.
3. Shorten meetings. Conclude meetings before their scheduled ending time. Cancel meetings altogether. You’ll be a hero, and staff can work on the projects they were hired to do. There’s no question meetings serve a value, so when you do hold them, keep them focused, engage your team, encourage participation and knock them off five minutes early. Then go to Dairy Queen to celebrate.
4.  Stop doing the same thing over and over. This one seems pretty self-evident, but that doesn’t seem to stop people from slogging through the mud on the same path they got stuck in last month.

Instead, do one thing different. For example, if you head up the maintenance department and the shrubs you plant in front of the building in the same place die two years in a row, don’t do it again. Find another spot to plant them because maybe the sunlight or shade caused the problem. Or, order a different type of bush and see if that will flourish. This is why the change-up is such a great pitch in baseball. Instead of continuing to throw the fast ball at 92 miles per hour that the batter is ready for, the change-up causes him to swing and miss and turn his body into a pretzel.
 
Shake things up in your office. You’ll have more fun, encourage productivity and quite likely increase your profits.