What, Exactly, is Business Development?

 “I do biz dev.”

Few times in history have more ambiguous words been spoken.  Ask ten “VPs of Business Development” or similarly business card-ed folks what is business development, and you’re like to get just as many answers.

“Business development is sales,” some will say, concisely.

“Business development is partnerships,” others will say, vaguely.

“Business development is hustling,” the startup folks will say, evasively.

The assortment of varied and often contradictory responses to the basic question of “what, exactly, is business development” reminds me of the way physicists seek to explain what, exactly, is the universe.  With conflicting theories on the nature of black holes and bosons, the ultimate goal for those scientists is a Grand Unified Theory, a single definition that can elegantly explain how the universe itself operates at every level.

It's Brazil's World Cup to loose - World Cup Predictions

Looking for a World Cup favorite? All you really need to know is this: The World Cup gets underway Thursday in Sao Paulo, and it’s really hard to beat Brazil in Brazil.

The table below calculates every team’s chances of advancing past the group stage and eventually winning the tournament. The forecasts are based on the Soccer Power Index (SPI) — a system that combines game- and player-based ratings to estimate a team’s overall skill level — to calculate odds of each country’s performance during the two stages of the World Cup. SPI has Brazil as the heavy favorite, with a 45 percent chance of winning the World Cup, well ahead of Argentina (13 percent), Germany (11 percent) and Spain (8 percent).

True, Brazil is the betting favorite to win the World Cup — but perhaps not by as wide a margin as it should be. The team’s price at the betting market Betfair as of early Sunday evening implied that it has about a 23 percent chance of winning the World Cup — only a little better than Argentina (19 percent), Germany (13 percent) and Spain (13 percent).