{"id":702,"date":"2016-03-02T10:00:08","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T10:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/?p=702"},"modified":"2025-07-01T17:20:23","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T17:20:23","slug":"what-everybody-knows-is-frequently-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/what-everybody-knows-is-frequently-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhat Everybody Knows Is Frequently Wrong.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his book, \u201cA Class With Drucker\u201d William Cohen talks about the \u201clost lessons\u201d he learned from renowned management guru, Peter Drucker, as a first-year graduate student in Drucker\u2019s classroom.\u00a0 One of those lessons was to disregard so-called \u201cconventional wisdom,\u201d avoid being a crowd follower, and draw your own conclusions about a situation based on your own analysis of the facts.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Expert after expert testified that running a mile in under four minutes was an impossibility.\u00a0 It simply could not be done.\u00a0 The human body was just not designed to be able to run that fast.\u00a0 Yet on May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister, who apparently didn\u2019t get the memo on the impossibility of it, broke the 4-minute mile.\u00a0 Today, some high school runners are able to break four minutes, and the current world record is 3:43.13.\u00a0 For more on Drucker\u2019s admonition against following the crowd and why it\u2019s important to your business, please continue reading below.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Everybody Knows Is Frequently Wrong.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>– Peter Drucker<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Or as Mark Twain once said, \u201cIt ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been making false assumptions since we thought the earth was flat.\u00a0 And those false assumptions have been wreaking havoc with our decision-making processes.\u00a0 It stands to reason, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 If you base a decision on a false assumption, that decision is unlikely to be one of your best.<\/p>\n

Author Cohen talks about the Tylenol scare in 1982 when tragically, several people died from Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide.\u00a0 Prior to this unfortunate episode, Tylenol was the most popular brand in its category, controlling 35% of a $2 billion market. Afterwards, \u201ceverybody\u201d knew the product was dead.\u00a0 It would never recover.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But Johnson & Johnson didn\u2019t buy into the universal assumption that the brand was dead.\u00a0 The company had a marketing and public relations plan that they thought would save Tylenol.\u00a0 And it did.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Still, Drucker says that everybody is frequently<\/span><\/em> wrong, not always<\/span><\/em> wrong.\u00a0 Therefore, sometimes what \u201ceverybody knows\u201d to be true, actually is true.\u00a0 The problem, then, is to figure out how to analyze assumptions upon which you\u2019re basing an important decision in a way that you can separate the false assumptions from the true ones..\u00a0 To do that, we basically have to trace the assumptions back in time to their origins.\u00a0 Let\u2019s say, for example, we\u2019re considering a change to our long-standing marketing approach.\u00a0 We would want to look at the assumptions underlying our current approach.\u00a0 Were those assumptions formulated in-house or by an outside consultant?\u00a0 When were those assumptions formulated?\u00a0 At that time, were market conditions about the same as now?\u00a0 If not, are those assumptions still valid?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Sometimes we learn that assumptions are buried so deep in a company\u2019s culture that nobody really knows how or why they got there.\u00a0 In other cases, we may learn that an assumption found its origin when it rolled off an influential tongue that nobody wanted to challenge.\u00a0 Or, as in the example above, we may find that an assumption was born under conditions that no longer exist.\u00a0 The point is, when making critical decisions, don\u2019t let \u201cWhat everybody knows\u201d go unchallenged.\u00a0 When your mother says she loves you, check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his book, \u201cA Class With Drucker\u201d William Cohen talks about the \u201clost lessons\u201d he learned from renowned management guru, Peter Drucker, as a first-year graduate student in Drucker\u2019s classroom.\u00a0 One of those lessons was to disregard so-called \u201cconventional wisdom,\u201d avoid being a crowd follower, and draw your own conclusions about a situation based on<\/p>\n

Read More\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,30,26,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1183,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions\/1183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}