One of my business partners and I had an interesting chat the other day. Somehow the topic of self-awareness arose with regards to determining where one's weakness lies in any given type of activity. I proposed that every activity can be broken down into several sub-activities and that working on the weakest of those will yield an overall net gain in performance. Conversely, the opposite of working on one's weakness is continuing to work on one's strengths, and people do so for a variety of reasons: familiarity, routine and perhaps a lack of honesty about their overall skill levels. It stands to reason that continuing to work on what is considered to be one's strengths results in only a very slight overall gain with the sub-activity skill levels are tallied.

During a recent conversation with a prominent North American equipment distributor, I was reminded of the difficulties faced by companies distributing high-quality equipment and ammunition to public service agencies. Chief among those difficulties are organizations spending money on equipment without a significant trial period to ensure the gear solves a known problem. While organizations spending money should be a good problem for distributors to have, there is always a danger down the road with buyer's remorse due to the expense and the equipment not living up to expectations. Not an ideal situation for a distributor seeking to maintain healthy long-term relationships with their clients.