It’s Inevitable
I’ve decided to document my 10 most inevitable and irrefutable (sort of like Murphy) laws of business:
(1) When you are waiting on that call announcing a big deal or waiting for that one chance to talk to a key person you’ve been courting for months, that call will come in during those very few seconds you break to use the bathroom after waiting for hours and holding it as long as you can
(2) When you finally establish an email dialogue with a potential client that you’ve been waiting seemingly years to connect with, when you push send on that one note you really need to be brilliant on, you’ll find an error in the language that really makes you look foolish (by the way, “recall” doesn’t work)
(3) When you have just one visit to close a deal you’ve worked on for months, something will go wrong with your plane reservations – guaranteed
(4) If you find a major error in your presentation before the most important presentation of your life (they all seem that way), the one Kinko’s close enough to quickly redo that presentation will either be overwhelmed and can’t do it or be out of power because that entire city block has gone down
(5) When your team says “this one’s a slam dunk”, expect that effort to be the hardest one to close for the year
(6) When you submit your budget and have thoroughly scrutinized every possible line item and every possible component cost or spend, one of the approving authorities will say “did you include this” and you’ll immediately go “doy” because you didn’t
(7) In any major meeting of the senior leadership of an organization, when the officiator asks “who wants to go first”, no one will make eye contact and my pity to the person on the far right who always gets picked to go first
(8) If you write in an email a flaming rebuttal to any particular issue and want to only send it to a certain small group of like minded folks to you, somehow that email finds its way to the individual who set you off to begin with even though you wanted to vent without them ever seeing it (did I mention that “recall” doesn’t work?)
(9) When you absolutely have to have a specific budget approval approved by a certain date in order to meet mission milestones, it absolutely positively won’t get approved on that date…in fact, it will only get approved when the time pressure is off and it’s not that important from a time standpoint anymore
AND
(10) The minute you think you’ve seen it all, you haven’t; the minute you think you’ve heard every single excuse imaginable, you haven’t; the minute you think you know exactly what investment is required to achieve a desired business objective, you don’t; the minute you think you’ve communicated enough to make sure absolutely everyone knows exactly what’s going on, you haven’t; the minute you think you’re a shoo in for that promotion, you’re not; and the minute you think that business success is all because of you, it isn’t