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As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you have more than enough work to do to keep you personally engaged.  And you’d like to believe your employees are in the same boat—always busy, and never bored at work.

Efficiency and efficacy are concepts that in the business world have considerable importance, and our confusion about their meanings will affect a company’s success. Efficiency is when an activity is done in the best way possible and with the least expenditure of energy and resources.  Efficacy, on the other hand, is when we are capable of achieving a goal, despite the expenditure of energy and resources.

And, as small business owners and entrepreneurs know, what separates thriving businesses from those that fail is a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work.

As business owners and entrepreneurs, we need to be concerned about our freedoms.  Our ability to create and produce, to answer the needs of markets, and to employ the kinds of people we need that will generate an atmosphere of trust and confidence is dependent on those freedoms.

Courageous leadership is making decisions based on good business principles that still may not be popular or without significant risk.

The identification of who will be the next generation to own and manage a business is one of the most critical management tasks for a business owner.  This action is what guarantees the owner’s personal retirement goals and sets in place the owners’ legacy for continuing the business into the future.

Seeing and understanding how the powerful become powerless is crucial to business leaders and entrepreneurs.  This is how the potential solution (change-oriented employee) becomes the problem (status quo, change-resistant employee).

Metrics are used to drive improvement and help businesses focus their people and resources on what’s important. The range of metrics that companies employ vary from those that are mandatory – for legal, safety, or contractual purposes – to those that track increases in efficiency, reductions in complaints, higher profits, and more significant savings.

For organizations to be successful, they need to have unity.  They need to be, using office speak, “singing from the same sheet of music.” There needs to be organizational unity at the highest level.

The business world is not conducive to opting out. Sure, there are many aspects where we can simplify our lives and have more rudimentary accounting systems, management policies, and personal relationships.  But we still have a life of commitments. We are in business to fulfill a need, and the people whose needs we are fulfilling are depending on us.  Being in business is making a commitment to be in business.