The Six Biggest Small Business Lies – A Countdown: #4

Growing a small business is the most complex activity a human being can undertake.

No surprise then there is a ready audience for comforting truisms.

I am doing a count-down of the top six deceptions trotted out in the business world.

Here’s number four.

4. It’s Meant To Be

It isn’t meant to be.

I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. That’s just me. But then I don’t believe in work-life-balance or time management either.

In my world believing something is pre-ordained, ‘was meant to be’, is a way of ducking two harsh facts in business:

1. Almost everything that happens is the consequence of a decision;
2. Shit happens. What isn’t the consequence of a decision is result of random chance.

A business is either growing or dying. The quality of our decision-making every day decides which it is doing. Let’s stop putting our heads in the sands of fatalism and start making tough decisions.

Sample Size: 1

The less information we have the poorer the quality of our decisions and the higher the risk to our business. Owners and managers must reach out of the comfort zone of the sample-size of 1: believing in their own intuition or a monolithic fate.

We must also reach beyond the comfort zone of our friends and colleagues who think just like us. We must become used to asking people who disagree with us; people outside our comfort zone.

Comfortable is not the same as right.

We are trying grow businesses in a world where the rules change every morning and the volume of information doubles every few hours. Failing to understand the role of decision making and the laws of chance in this world can be fatal.

Business Owner Implications

• Over-share. Instead of hoarding information and doling out controlled bits to your employees in a father-knows-best or mother-knows-best way, sharing information must become the default. Don’t ask “why should you know this?” Ask “why shouldn’t you know this?”
• Ignorance and Confidence are Correlated
• Consider disparate opinions. One powerful sentence in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is “Small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do.” The more limited the information we work with the more likely we are to be wrong, and when we are wrong we are more likely to be extremely wrong.
• Take smart chances. The real heart of confidence in business: moving forward in the face of known risk.
• Embrace chance. Chance creates infinitely more possibilities than fate. By understanding something doesn’t happen because it is meant to happen, but because chance selected it from other possibilities, we admit to truly new possibilities.
• Take a shot. If there are no hot hands, no secrets, no pre-ordained causes, we are all functioning on a level playing field. Not only is the random beautiful, it is the ultimate democracy. Each of us has an equal shot at success based on the business decisions we make. We will make some good decisions and some poor ones. But so will everyone else.

“What I’ve learned above all, is to keep marching forward, because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at-bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success. Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said: ‘If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.’” Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk – How Randomness Rules Our Lives