Sunday 3 January 2016

The Best Business Tip You Will Read This Year (or Why I Love Retailing)

The start of a new year is a great time for all those business tips to be pushed out. You know the ones - the sure fire ways to success in 2016 - what the top 15 business leaders will do in 2016 - and so on. But here is one quote that is almost an anti-tip and it highlights why I just love my role as a trader at the Queen Victoria Market.

Chess champion Garry Kasparov once said - “There’s this conventional wisdom that it’s possible to give universal advice — a tip. But we’re all different. Your decision-making process is as unique as your fingerprints or your DNA. Something that works for you may be counterproductive for me. Some of us are more aggressive; some more defensive. You have to understand who you are, know what you’re capable of and what you’re not, and then try to construct a game — or a deal or a campaign — in which your superior qualities will be factors and your disadvantages will not be displayed.”

As market traders we get to make decisions on finance, marketing, resourcing, and human relations every day. I am fond of telling my acquaintances in big business that they may think they have problems in the specialised field of management, but just try making decisions across every field of management on a daily basis. But that is why we love market trading. Market trading gives us the opportunity to tweak this, adjust that, and as Kasparov said, leave our unique fingerprint on our business. I will add a qualification here. Little progress happens without learning. As American coach John Wooden once said "It is what you learn after knowing it all that counts".

So here is a tip for 2016 (I know, it us actually three tips in one) - 

" Be yourself, play to your strengths, and keep on learning."