i consider myself to be good with numbers and knowledgeable about business type stuff. i know about politics, law, finance, accountancy, tax. and i’ve read quite a lot of self help re self-management. absolutely useless at telling people what to do. panic and nasusea at the idea of writing my own to-do list on a monday and never plan more than like three days ahead. but nonetheless, confident that i understand business generally. and anytime i see ‘ebitda’ i wince. you may as well be telling me turnover. it’s an irrelevant metric. it means ‘earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation’ – but so what? apple computer’s ebitda may be 100 billion dollars. but it can’t achieve that without paying taxes, paying interest on its debt, replacing out of date hardware (depreciation) and developing new intellectual property (amortisation). apple needs to keep incurring all those costs or it will go bust.

do you suffer from executive dysfunction? how do you cope?