A good discipline to get into with regards to any form of sales or account management:
*Write down* "If we lose this deal, it will be because of X." in advance.
If you lose the deal/account/etc, ask why you lost it.
Check against your prediction, and get better at predicting.
This naturally applies to e.g. seeking investment, trying to hire someone, trying to get a job, etc etc.
You write things down in advance, ideally with a confident number attached to them, because it defangs the risk of 20/20 hindsight and helps you synthesize insights.
"Looks like we were correct over 80% of our time that in competitive situations with AppAmaGooBookSoft candidates would explicitly cite total comp as the reason they are declining to take our offer. OK, that's reality. What strategic decision do we make now that we know it?"
Conversely, if your sales team writes down "If we lose this deal, it will be because of the cost" and the customer literally never says "It was the cost", a) fix the actual problem and b) time for a chat with sales about not discounting so much, thank you, really not helping.
"But Patrick, sometimes people don't tell me the reason the deal didn't get done, or don't accurately introspect why the deal got done, or aren't candid about why the deal didn't get done."
Yep we're playing a game with partial information, but that doesn't mean total ignorance.
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This is simultaneously one of the best arguments for pedagogy *actually working*, since Europeans and Koreans successfully acquire language proficiency via formal schooling but Japanese and Americans mostly do not.
I know that it is extremely uncouth in the US to compare educational outcomes but the stats for e.g. scores on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test are available on a per test site basis, and they say what they say.
(About 90% of US majors in Japanese who are not heritage speakers deserve a refund, or at least they did prior to the YouTube generations.)
The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.
“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.
Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.
They need repeat custom.
A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.
It worked out for me, but, be careful which major life decisions you delegate to the zeitgeist and/or high-status organizations that are not scored on predicting the future accurately.
I worry, a lot, that the tech industry does not do a sufficiently good job of communicating “Despite what you may read in the paper: you can get a job here, your work will likely be in the cause of righteousness, you will be well compensated, and you will do well by your values.”
1) This hospital should receive zero doses in the future, until competent healthcare providers have had need satisfied for a critically limited resource.
2) If you are told you that choices are throwing out a vaccine or losing your license, strongly consider losing paperwork.
Or even "Damn it I slipped and administered a covid vaccine. So clumsy of me. I filed an accident report per the usual procedure. Luckily, since the covid vaccine is safe, there was no medical impact aside from the vaccination to covid."
"Sorry boss it happened 372 times again yesterday. I take full responsibility for the errors; just been pulling a lot of overtime recently with the holidays and all. Here's the accident forms."