Easily-Made Mistakes in Business, 50

1. Taking notes but not listening. Then not reading the notes.
2. Failing to qualify (is there budget? who decides?) new business.
3. Craving certainty.
4. Believing we are limited by conclusions from Belbin, MBTI, StrengthFinder or any other handy diagnostic.
5. Thinking pizza and soda will boost productivity.
6. Not being your own customer and finding out what it is really like to try and order something, complain or even say thank you.
7. Creating slides which are great notes for us, the presenter but paralysingly boring visuals for the audience.
8. Thinking Steve McQueen had a leadership style. He was cool. He drove nice cars, fast. But he didn’t have a leadership style.
9. Forgetting to do marketing strategy not just marketing communication.
10. Cancelling training and development when times are tough.
11. Upping the sales forecast based solely upon a spreadsheet growth function.
12. Not giving feedback to a member of staff immediately, good or bad.
13. Forgetting that money alone is not a motivator. But people feeling really, truly deeply valued is.
14. Drinking bad coffee.
15. Driving when we could be walking.
16. Thinking we are too busy. Actually we lack focus.
17. Not asking for 360 degree feedback and seeking it 360 days of the year.
18. Stopping exercising. When it will give us exactly the life we seek. Energetic, impassioned, focused.
19. That time is measured by a timepiece. Time is measured by value delivered.
20. Failing to stop and think.
21. Using the wrong kinds of drugs. The right kind?
22. Believing a job title means anything.
23. Trying to please all customers. That long-tail of bizarre customers will bring down your business.
24. Thinking sleep is an option.
25. Not putting e-mail replies though a 4h incubator. Receive/draft reply/incubate/edit/send.
26. Hoping everybody will love you for your thinking. If your thinking is useful some will hate you for it. C'est La Vie.
27. Thinking a headache is a call for paracetamol. It’s a call to change something.
28. Failing to respond to e-mail promptly. But see 25 above.
29. Not understanding decision vs. action.  Decisions are stagnant: I have given up smoking. Actions have momentum: crushing the current packet.
30. Certainly not understanding explicit (let’s reduce debtor days by 25%) vs. implicit (let’s improve).
31. Diluting reach and/or brand by trying to do everything.
32. Not being different. Different is company x solution x you.
33. Thinking an MBA is the end. Actually it is just the start of realising there is a science to business. And it does work. And social media is just 2.3% of that science.
34. Thinking meetings and e-mail are free. They are not.
35. Not reading to simply be better than you were last week.
36. Using lifts/elevators when by taking the stairs you raise your heart rate which helps you cope with the next meeting.
37. Using it’s when we mean its. And vice versa.
38. Allowing the business to become a country club with lounges, Italian coffee machines and lunch-time yoga when it needs to be a base camp with a planning room, check-lists and focused, passionate individuals poised for the assault.
39. Staying sort of OK. Yeah, sort of. Right. When excellent is just a decision away.
40. Not using the first quiet hours of the day for thinking.
41. Selling using discount.
42. Failing to leave some days blank. 
43. Chasing work life/balance. Chase a job you love. Talk to your family. The issue disappears.
44. Getting annoyed at airports. Airports are a free anger management workshop without the PPT slide deck. Yes sir, you do have to take your shoes off one more time.
45. Deferring the enjoyment of life to holidays and/or retirement.
46. Melodrama or dramatising trivia.
47. Failing to chase money when the due date on the invoice has passed.
48. Not growing up and realising we write the novel called Life.
49. Staying late when your kids want, need and love your bed-time stories.
50. Thinking that vibrating phone needs to be answered now, right this minute.

More detail in Instant MBA.