When we say that a person is “good at business,” what do we mean?
Maybe someone is good at business because they know how to sell. Sales certainly matter. But plenty of companies have generated impressive sales while destroying themselves in the process. If every dollar of revenue costs you two dollars to produce, more sales may just get you to bankruptcy faster.
A related answer is that being good at business means making a lot of money. That doesn’t quite work either. A company can generate enormous profits for a period and then lose them just as quickly. The opposite is true too: Some of the most successful companies in history (like Amazon and Uber) spent years losing money while they built something extremely valuable. We are seeing versions of the same phenomenon today as companies spend extraordinary amounts of money building the infrastructure for AI.
Another thing that springs to mind when we think of a typical “good businessperson” is risk. Maybe being good at business means hi…
