The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [29]
I believe in research, but I don’t expect the research to give me much more than a glimmer, an imperfect snapshot, of a moment in time. Bell-shaped curves won’t really tell me how to design a vision for the future. Surveys won’t reveal how the dreams of tomorrow should be shaped because nobody knows. If the builders of early automobiles had asked people what they wanted in transportation, the probable answer would have been, “Faster horses.”
If you want to fail, don’t take time to think. If you want to succeed, take lots of time to think. Thinking is the best investment you’ll ever make in your company, in your own career, in your life.
When Steve Bennett, a bright Jack Welch GE alum, took over as CEO of Intuit, the company had a set of ten operating values. He changed only one word in all ten values. The ninth one was “Think Fast, Act Fast.” He changed it to “Think Smart, Act Fast.” Intuit was doing well. It has done even better under Bennett’s leadership. Taking time to think really matters. As Gandhi noted, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” Success is not all about moving faster. Failure, though, definitely is.
2. Data, Unprocessed, Can Mask Reality
In the early part of the twentieth century, traditional physics was being revolutionized by further advancements in quantum mechanics. You don’t have to understand physics to have a grasp of the fundamental philosophical revelation that it is simply impossible to know everything about the world. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle ensures that we cannot be certain of what we observe because what we observe is influenced by the very process of observing. Not long ago a couple of physicists observed that we can’t be too certain of the uncertainty principle, either!
So when we say we “know” something we’d best be cautious in our epistemological assertions.
“It ain’t so much the things we know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”
—Mark Twain
(Some know it was not Mark Twain who said this. It was Artemus Ward, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Will Rogers. I know, for a fact, that it was none of these. It was my uncle Vern. I know. I was there when he said it.)
SOMETIMES WE SEE what we expect to see, not reality but the data that we think represent reality. Or that we want to represent reality.
There is a psychological bias called the confirmation trap. We seek to confirm our preconceived views rather than see what might be wrong with those views.
Enron fooled many people, including many in the firm itself. Yet Enron people were bamboozled simply because they did not really think about what they were looking at in the balance sheets. They were so eager for the implausible and incomprehensible numbers to be true that they ignored them. The business press was equally gullible. They wanted the “hot” story, not necessarily the truth. Again and again, art forgers and con artists of all stripes exploit the gullibility of even the most sophisticated among us. They understand our need to at times believe fantasy over reality.
In the late 1940s, when Pepsi was selling “twice as much for a nickel,” Coca-Cola executives fooled themselves by quarterly reporting sales of the product in cases. And those case sales reports showed that Coke was selling far more cases than the competitor. The only problem was that a case of Coca-Cola was twenty-four six-and-a-half-ounce bottles while the case of Pepsi was twenty-four twelve-ounce bottles. No one asked the obvious question, “If we are selling more cases, why are they constantly gaining on us?” The reality of that question led to the final breakthrough of larger-size bottles for Coca-Cola.
Detroit automakers fooled themselves for years looking at the sales figures they wanted to look at rather than thinking about the total picture of the global automotive industry. They even fooled themselves on