For at least 16 years, and probably more, all of us internalized these three words with emotions spiking from excitement to worry to despair as we stepped over the threshold from summer’s simplicity to school’s reality. And here I am thinking the same things once again as I’m about to be catapulted from Labor Day’s labor of packing away beach chairs into the classrooms of Tufts and MIT.
My day job of running our management consulting company is wonderfully complex and extremely fulfilling, but it’s my time spent teaching marketing at Tufts and business planning at MIT that challenges me in a very different way. Most of whatever “spare time” I can scrape together in the summer is spent on the beach updating curricula, writing out class notes and testing out new ideas for school, all of which has a very liquid spillover effect for our business. The process is fun, stimulating and has an added benefit since, as Henry Ford said…
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
One of the byproducts of this prep time and my going back to school is the annual updating of our free ebook, Writing the Winning Business Plan, which you can download by clicking on the title. To those who tried to download this last week, sorry for the inconvenience, but stupidly, I decided I could figure out how to do this without the help of our very creative and supportive IT geniuses at Lynton Web. Didn’t work so well, but thanks to Lynton’s rescue, we’re connected once again.
Go ahead and click away, and hopefully you can put some of the ideas here to work immediately in your upcoming fall business planning and budgeting process for next year. Take a look, and please let me know what you think. Email me with any questions. Also, if you’d like to add to the book or edit what’s there, just let me know, and I’ll make sure that we incorporate your ideas with comments about you and your firm into the next edition due out in mid-winter.
Part of the whole "going back to school" thing, might also be attending our Sales Management Boot Camp, October 2nd-4th in Boston, where we have just four more openings. Here’s a short summary: CAMP, or just send me an email at jack@derbymanagement.com, and I can schedule a 5 minute call to answer any questions and go through the details.
In the meantime, Good Selling, as we all head back to school in some fashion during the next week or so.
Please be safe with this storm...
Jack Derby
Head Coach
