In his book, “A Class With Drucker” William Cohen talks about the “lost lessons” he learned from renowned management guru, Peter Drucker, as a first-year graduate student in Drucker’s classroom. One of those lessons was to disregard so-called “conventional wisdom,” avoid being a crowd follower, and draw your own conclusions about a situation based on your own analysis of the facts. For example, when Swedish track star Gunder Haegg set a world record for running a mile in 4 minutes, 1.4 seconds, it was common knowledge that running a mile in under four minutes was impossible. Expert after expert testified that running a mile in under four minutes was an impossibility. It simply could not be done. The human body was just not designed to be able to run that fast. Yet on May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister, who apparently didn’t get the memo on the impossibility of it, broke the 4-minute mile. Today, some high school runners are able to break four minutes, and the current world record is 3:43.13. For more on Drucker’s admonition against following the crowd and why it’s important to your business, please continue reading below.
“What Everybody Knows Is Frequently Wrong.” – Peter Drucker
Or as Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
We’ve been making false assumptions since we thought the earth was flat. And those false assumptions have been wreaking havoc with our decision-making processes. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If you base a decision on a false assumption, that decision is unlikely to be one of your best.
Author Cohen talks about the Tylenol scare in 1982 when tragically, several people died from Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide. Prior to this unfortunate episode, Tylenol was the most popular brand in its category, controlling 35% of a $2 billion market. Afterwards, “everybody” knew the product was dead. It would never recover. According to popular sentiment at the time, the maker of Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson, should retire the brand, formulate a new product with a new name, and start over. But Johnson & Johnson didn’t buy into the universal assumption that the brand was dead. The company had a marketing and public relations plan that they thought would save Tylenol. And it did. The product slowly but surely regained its previous market position, and preserved the hundreds of millions of sales dollars that would otherwise have gone down the drain.
Still, Drucker says that everybody is frequently wrong, not always wrong. Therefore, sometimes what “everybody knows” to be true, actually is true. The problem, then, is to figure out how to analyze assumptions upon which you’re basing an important decision in a way that you can separate the false assumptions from the true ones.. To do that, we basically have to trace the assumptions back in time to their origins. Let’s say, for example, we’re considering a change to our long-standing marketing approach. We would want to look at the assumptions underlying our current approach. Were those assumptions formulated in-house or by an outside consultant? When were those assumptions formulated? At that time, were market conditions about the same as now? If not, are those assumptions still valid? So we keep drilling down on the history of an assumption looking for its origin and trying to determine if the conditions that spawned this particular assumption still hold water.
Sometimes we learn that assumptions are buried so deep in a company’s culture that nobody really knows how or why they got there. In other cases, we may learn that an assumption found its origin when it rolled off an influential tongue that nobody wanted to challenge. Or, as in the example above, we may find that an assumption was born under conditions that no longer exist. The point is, when making critical decisions, don’t let “What everybody knows” go unchallenged. When your mother says she loves you, check it out.
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