Business Lessons Learned At Traffic School

If you’re like most people, you certainly do not automatically associate traffic school with the concepts of entrepreneurship and business acumen.  However, upon further consideration you might be surprised; believe it or not, there are quite a few general lessons and principles one can learn from traffic school that can be applied to the business world.  Let’s take a look at a few of the lessons traffic school instills in students, and how you can extrapolate useful business principles from those lessons:

• Risk Mitigation and Management – Traffic school really helps drive home the value of a good insurance policy for many people, and helps them to understand how it mitigates their personal financial risk in case of an accident.  The business world also requires risk mitigation and management, on several different levels.  On the most obvious level, businesses require insurance policies much like private individuals do to directly mitigate risk, and they also engage in asset diversification so as to minimize their financial vulnerabilities as well.
• Past Behavior Predicts Future Performance – Another powerful business lesson one can draw from attending traffic school is that past behavior tends to predict future performance.  In fact, this axiom is behind the reason most people find themselves in traffic school in the first place; they are repeat offenders, and society is trying to break that pattern.  The implications in the world of business are myriad.  One can intuit how an asset’s value may fluctuate, the performance of an employee, or any one of a number of valuable insights by applying this general principle.
• Regulations May Vary by State – Plenty of new residents of Texas have ended up in traffic school because of the strange U-turn lanes the state uses, which are drastically unlike those found in most of the rest of the nation.  New Bostonians feel the same way about their confusing system of roundabouts.  Much how basic traffic laws can differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, in some cases quite dramatically, business laws can vary in the same way.  Things get even more complicated when crossing national borders, but considerations like taxation, supply, shipping, distribution, and labor cost can all vary depending on location.
• The Pareto Principle – Most traffic school instructors can anecdotally vouch for the fact (which crash and violation statistics seem to support) that about 80% of the problems encountered on the road are due to 20% of the drivers.  In business, this effect is known as the Pareto principle, and has numerous implications.  80% of revenue may be generated by 20% of your customers, or 80% of your customer service efforts may be dedicated towards dealing with a troublesome 20%; the important thing to grasp is that it is a mathematical principle which means that most of any effect is attributable to a relatively small subset of the initial causes.

Anthony Lopez, the CEO of MetroTrafficSchool.com, points out that “Traffic school can benefit people for a wide variety of reasons.”  He continued, “People have dissected works of Ancient literature such as the I Ching and The Art of War in an attempt to identify clear, actionable business principles applicable in the modern age.  Is it any stranger that similar wisdom might be found within traffic school?"  Indeed, it would seem not.