Matt Mayfield's Business Blog

Numbered because I suspect there will be more….

When we enter into negotiations with our customer, we are distributing risk based on who perceives the lowest risk and who can best manage, absorb, or assess the risk. If your company is unable to manage any type of risk better than your customer, then you are in trouble. If you are doing complex selling, then you are trying to get paid for risks that you can handle more efficiently than your customer– that is the essence of large, complex, services (and often product) business. Unfortunately, there are a number of techniques corporate lawyers use to sabotage good, healthy risk taking: Read more…

“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

My corollary, similar to that famous quote is, “Risk of being killed can have positive consequences”.

Years ago when I was Director of Engineering for a division of Honeywell, I was curiously following a long-standing problem facing my colleague, Tom Armfield.  Tom was a seasoned manager who had just been promoted from field service manager to Director of Manufacturing.  (See “Production vs Prototype Sales” for more on Tom.)  The problem was with the work quality of the team that manufactured the electrical control cabinets was terrible and it was affecting the entire company. Read more…