What does it mean to be a businessman today? It is not a specialization like any other.
It is a tough area, complicated, very disputed, which it includes many subject matters,
but also pretty new.
If mathematics are studied since antiquity, business administration as higher education
specialization is a 20th century innovation.
In mathematics, solving a problem generally means starting with a set of known data and
finding only one solution.
In business, you have to make an effort in order to define the problem and always to find
a solution, but it is not the only one. There is no method of getting you to finding it.
Moreover, time makes a business that worked for a while, to slowly or suddenly become a disaster.
That is because a business is always in motion. Everything moves: the market, the clients, the
suppliers, the competition, the legislation, the fashion.
The business is like a system of equations, in which the number of unknown variables is always
larger than the number of equations. There is more than one solution. If we could have only
one solution, all the competitors would find it sooner or later, so there would not be any profit.
The manager who has the whole business responsibility has to set certain parameters in order to
solve the system. He sets the parameters either intuitively, from books, imitating others, or
using deductions. If these parameters are set by mistake (even only one), the business gets
into the loss area, which is very large, instead of getting into the profit area, which is
usually very thin.
A faculty of business tries to offer you a set of very clear rules you should always take into
consideration in order to set these parameters as accurate as possible. Where intuition works,
you should count on it. For all others, you should count on this set of rules. But no business
can be built by chance. Only by talent and study.
You are born with talent: you have it or you do not. No school can build talent in business.
Whereas, if you have talent and you count only on it, it is for sure you will eventually break
your neck.
In conclusion success in business has one simple pattern:
