Everyone wants to be Number One. We climb, claw, and fight our way to the top for the privilege and honor of being able to declare, “We’re number one!”

But when it comes to business, one is the worst possible number. You NEVER want to find yourself with “one.” One customer, one vendor, one supplier, one key employee, one way of doing things, one of anything. I suppose there might be cases where “one” works, but even in those instances, two or more is almost always better.

Anywhere in your business that the number one can be found, it’s your job to root it out. When there’s a “one” in your business it will often become a choke point; the bottleneck that defines the velocity for the entire enterprise. You’ll find your efforts stuck there again and again and again.

Even being the only choice available creates some serious issues, as John D. Rockefeller, Ma Bell, and a few others who found themselves sitting across the table from federal anti-trust investigators learned the hard way.

For the rest of this week, I’ll be writing about different ways in which one is a number you want to avoid.

Mainly because I didn’t want there to be only one post about it.