I find myself fighting conventional wisdom at every turn lately.
I guess that is the nature of mature economies and economies where there is a great deal of strife, uncertainty, and lack of innovation.
Or, maybe its the conventional wisdom that drives the lack of innovation.
Either way, I have been leading a number of online membership and fundraising campaigns lately and the theme of them has all been something of the nature:
“we’ve always done it this way”
“we don’t know where to start”
“no one has ever put it like that before”
The answer in most cases falls into the lap of conventional wisdom.
We’ve always done it this way because its easy. Easier to do things the same way that we always have and have our business and effort become a little less effective every time we start another campaign.
We don’t know where to start because we really haven’t looked. It is easier to not start than to start and figure out what isn’t working. If you figure out what isn’t working or isn’t effective, you are likely going to have to make some sort of adjustment to your strategy.
No one has ever put it to you like that before because you maybe haven’t been listening to outside opinions. Or, maybe you are listening to the same opinions as everyone else. Its much easier to go along with the masses of people listening to someone like that is spewing ideas about crushing things and hustling at all costs as opposed to the person that is telling you having a strategy to drive hard work is and it still might not mean you are successful…that’s a different story.
On that note, I’ve been reading Peter Drucker’s Managing For Results over the last week. Its the first book on business strategy.
What’s most amazing about the book is that despite being 60 years old, it is still lively and relevant today.
The key is that Drucker mostly focused on people and the technology didn’t really interest him. Technology was much more difficult in those days than people.
The thing that strikes me today is that most of the challenges we are facing aren’t technology issues, but still people issues.
Yet, we still relish solving the easier challenges.