In any transaction, you want the right offering, at the right time, at the right price.  If you don’t have all three, don’t proceed.

In general, one party (or both in the mutual form) agrees that certain information is valuable to the other party and should not be disclosed.

Business meetings are a tool and, as with any tool, to get maximum efficiency and effectiveness, you need good technique.

Your focus should be accuracy first, precision after.  The level of precision should also be useful, not so crude as to prevent proper planning or execution and not so fine as to be unnecessarily exact, or worse, convey a level of certainty that is not justified by the data or process.

“Moving the goalposts” is shorthand for changing the terms of some arrangement.

Consider the responsibilities, benefits, and limitations of a staff vs a management role.  Since here we are focused on early-career issues, deciding if management appeals to you is something you should consider soon and, if it is something you want to pursue, let your manager know.

Appreciate that not everything can be undone and, when dealing with the irreversible, proceed with extra care.

Recognize the terms, ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ and to think about whether you should apply either or both approaches.

Think first about what decisions will need to be made, then about what information would support those decisions, then about what kinds of reports would provide that information.

Partnership offers opportunities, to reach new markets, add new skills, enhance your brand through association, manage surges in demand, test-drive a deeper relationship, and so on.  Partnerships also have risks, such as mixed messages to the market, damaging your brand through association, additional complexity for your customers, intellectual property problems, employee retention challenges, revenue impacts, etc.  The point is to think carefully about all the potential upsides and downsides.  There can be a tendency to see most of the benefits and gloss over the risks.  This is not to say that partnership can’t offer great leverage; just look carefully and mitigate potential negatives.