It’s the things we think we know that we really don’t know that do
the real damage.
We knew instinctively that poorly manufactured products were the result
of sloppy workers, until W. Edwards Deming taught us that the first place
to look for the source of variability in manufactured goods was in raw
materials, tooling, and procedures. Japan listened to Deming in the 1950’s
and the U.S. did not, and the rest is history.
We knew instinctively that successful people are smart, work hard, and
never give up, and that unsuccessful people are the opposite, until the
role of chance became more widely known, most recently in Nassim Nicholas
Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.
And we knew instinctively that we should pay salespeople on commission,
until we looked at the role of luck in sales outcomes and began to wonder
if sales commissions reward excellence or are just a lottery. For more
detail on that topic, read this free excerpt from The Sales Force.
Complimentary review copies are available to professors and educators
who submit their request on their school's letterhead, or from their .edu
email address.
