Which lessons did you learn in your business career which changed your thinking and working methods?

Here’s another one from us: when working as a Finance Director in a global company, my boss occasionally said: “better be roughly right than precisely wrong”. Honestly, I thought what a nonsense. But after a couple of planning cycles, I got it. Sophisticated and large detailed business plans with a lot of KPIs often make the impression that everything has been taken into account and therefore the results of that plan must be right. However, the reality is that a lot of business decisions are actually based on the experience or gut feeling of top executives combined with a few basic KPIs. If you get these KPIs right then your plan is good enough to go.

Lesson learned: don’t “over plan” – better identify the really important key business drivers (e.g. success driver, market size, competition, expected growth etc.) of your plan and make sure these assumptions are correct. Put these in a plan which is simple and well comprehensible (especially for Executives).

The advantage here also is that you have a good and understandable foundation for a meaningful discussion in the Exec meeting.