“With a ton of charts and a wondrous plan, he comes, behold, the Research Man. Give him four and twenty scholars, give him twenty thousand dollars, and in two months he’ll bring to view, the facts that you already knew.”
Building a sustainably profitable business is a bit easier, and a lot more likely, when you couple that drive with a strong strategy.
My favorite cognitive bias is called “déformation professionelle.” Basically, we see the world through our jobs. It’s a bias I certainly have. I see everything through a marketing strategy lens. Often, that just makes me a boring conversation partner. But, sometimes, it actually helps.
Every great decision you make comes with downsides. There is never a perfect answer.
If you want things to change, you have to try to change things, and that entails assuming the risk that things might not go the way you want. Every plan is a guess about the future, and sometimes our guesses are wrong.
A common mistake when things go wrong is to spend time thinking about how they could have gone. Or how we’d hoped things would turn out.
Everyone who knows me well knows there’s one rule I live by. They know it because I’m always saying it. So often it’s probably their least favorite phrase. But I’ll keep saying it: If this then that, and if that, then what?
“The two biggest dangers in decision making are not making enough decisions and then not correcting the bad ones.”— David C. Baker
