Get rid of the deadwood. During good times, it's easy for companies to accumulate people whose performance is less than stellar. Business is growing, the job market is tight—and you justify in your mind keeping mediocre performers because the thought of interviewing 10 or 20 people to fill a position just turns you off. Also, during good times there is usually some staffing creep as managers pad their labor budgets to make sure they are able to handle any unexpected jump in business. When the market turns downward, leaders have the opportunity to prune away the deadwood in their organizations in a way that makes them more efficient, and that positions them to hire the best and the brightest in the industry when business picks back up.

Consider what the president of a regional real estate company told me recently: "We are making decisions in our business today that we simply could not have made when the business was on fire. We are laying off the least effective people in our business and getting a 'double hit' to productivity—the poor performers are out and the good performers are even more productive as they see us finally dealing with the poor performers. This downturn has positioned us to blow away our performance numbers of the past—even though our numbers were already some of the best in the nation."

In a ham-and-egg breakfast, the chicken makes a contribution but the pig is committed, the old saw goes. Have you ever noticed that when failure is not an option for leaders—when they are really committed—they usually seem to figure out a way to succeed?

Like many entrepreneurs, Jim McCann, founder of 1-800-Flowers.com (FLWS), didn't make much money when he bought his first shop, a flower store he opened in 1976. McCain was a social worker at the time seeking to supplement his income. But he discovered he had a knack for business, and one shop became several.

Ten years later, when he learned about a company for sale that owned the rights to a name he believed had lots of potential, 1-800-Flowers, he quickly arranged to purchase the business, thinking he was ready for the big time. That perception changed when he discovered what bad shape the business was in, including some $7 million of debt he hadn't known about. "We had great motivation to make this idea work," he said of the time, "because if we didn't, we had just lost everything we had built over 10 years."

Sales people talk too much. Watch an untrained sales person work and the prospect never gets a word in edgewise.

If all products were one-size-fits-all, the motor-mouth approach might work. But most accounts are custom jobs--especially when they involve technology solutions or financial and consulting gigs.

That's why the best sales people are disciplined listeners. They know how to ask open-ended questions. Then they shut up.

The best open-ended questions encourage prospects to lay out their problems, hopes and fears. They do the talking, not you. They're on the couch and you're the shrink. (Shrinks have it easier--they get paid no matter what. Sales people actually have to offer a compelling solution or else they don't get the business.) If you don't know what's truly eating customers, you have no idea how to help them. You might make a sale, but if the customer isn't satisfied, that sale will come back to haunt you.

Richard Goossen wears many hats. Over the past 20 years, Goossen, a lawyer, businessman, and academic, has founded startups, acted as strategic adviser to high-growth companies, written three books, and spoken extensively on the subject of entrepreneurship. Now the CEO of M&A Capital Corp. and a professor of entrepreneurship at Trinity Western University in Vancouver, B.C., Goossen recently decided to tackle the question:Can entrepreneurship be taught? (Businessweek.com, 10/30/06)

"If I go into any social setting, people always wonder how can you teach entrepreneurship," says Goossen. So he decided to explore the topic further. He rounded up a group of entrepreneurship experts ranging from Peter Drucker (Businessweek.com, 11/28/05) to Rita Gunther McGrath to Karl Vesper. He culled their insights, broke them down, and published the results in his most recent book, Entrepreneurial Excellence: Profit From the Best Ideas of the Experts (Career Press; 2007). "My motivation was to talk to the top researchers and instructors in the world who teach something that a lot of people think can't be taught," he says.