Bruce Lee (Nov. 27, 1940-July 20, 1973) is a founder of Jeet Kune Do martial arts movement and is considered one of the most influential martial artist of the 20th century, as well as a cultural icon.
In the book “Tao of Jeet Kune Do” you can read many of Bruce Lee’s well-known philosophies on his life and martial arts principles that made him a famous martial artist, actor, and an icon.
You will discover that Bruce Lee’s philosophical ideas in the book can be applied to many things in everyday life, including in business and management.
Here’s the five principles in the book that you can apply to your business or use to manage your business.
1. Intense Desire
“We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. Yet, it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents as well.”
To manage your business, it is important to have intense desire, not just a desire. Your desire to survive the competition, to make your business grow, to generate profit, must be intense as to keep you working even if your competitors are already sleeping.
3. Seek and seize opportunities.
“If you think you have the opening, you should let it fly and not be half-hearted about it.”
One of the characteristics of a good business person is the ability to seek opportunities and to seize opportunities when it comes along.
In business, opportunities sometimes come in the form of hard work. In addition, everyday the market offers various crisis and problems that are actually opportunities. These include product innovation, acting on customers’ complaints, trade credits, price discounts. Even a recession could be converted into business opportunities.
It is how you seek and seize opportunities that will spell the difference between profit and loss, between success and failure.
What separates a failed business person from a successful one? One of the answers is intense desire.
2. The Will to Win
“You can win if you want to badly enough,” means that the will to win is constant. No amount of punishment, no amount of effort, no condition is too “tough” to take in order to win.”
To win your customers and clientele means you must have the will to offer quality products and services that meet their needs and wants.
This means you must strive for customer satisfaction. You must instill in you and your subordinates the will to service excellence, to put the interest of the customers above your own.
4. Use Your Time and Energy Wisely
“A relaxed technician expends mental and physical energy constructively, converting it when it does not contribute to the solution of the problem and spending it freely when it does.”
To manage your business is to use time and energy wisely, as well as the time and energy of your people.
In business, as well as in any other areas of life, time is precious. And time waits for no man or woman, for the business world belongs to the quick-to those people who are fast to seize opportunities, to make the deal, to offer the best product or service to the customers.
How you use your time and energy to achieve your business objectives, e.g. business survival, growth, and profitability, depends on you as a manager or owner.
5. Practice makes perfect
“Each performance of an act strengthens the connections involved and makes the next performance easier, more certain, and more readily done.”
Management is an art. As an art, it needs constant practice, to make the art perfect.
The more you plan your business, organize your people and ways of doing things, lead your subordinates, and control costs, the more you will become knowledgeable in the art of managing.
Management does not only involves knowing, but more importantly, it requires implementation and execution. It is in the practice that you will be able to make your business survive, grow and be profitable.
Follow Bruce Lee’s five principles to manage your business and you will be successful.
Besides of Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do, he can also help you by giving some tips for your business.
ReplyDelete