Is It Always Good To Be Well Informed?
We’ve all heard the saying “knowledge is power.”
But is it really?
Okay, let me tell you how I came to pondering this idea. Last night I was talking to one of my friends who owns a local business in Lincoln. She was telling me about about all the time she spends going to networking events and how they frequently talk about the economy and politics and all that jazz.
If the economy is down, does it really matter to what extent? Does having that knowledge really help your business?
My take on this is no, it doesn’t.
There are plenty of stories (I’ll give a couple examples later) of people succeeding when they market conditions or they economy would have said they shouldn’t have been able to. But because they didn’t know any better, they succeeded anyway.
I remember back from my mlm days when my upline would say that December is a terrible month to be sponsoring people (i.e. bringing them into the cult). Then in January you’d hear from people who had record months because somebody failed to mention that little fact to them.
Here’s an example from Fordon Segal, founder of Crate and Barrel
“We didn’t know anything about retail,” Segal recalled. “I had grown up in the restaurant business, so I knew about service but not about retail. We didn’t know a market from a markdown. We didn’t know anything about importing. In fact, if we weren’t 23 and totally lacking wisdom, we would never have done this. You just go ahead with your passions, and you rush forward without a great deal of thought,” Segal reflected…
“We were truly a counter-culture story of the 1960s,” Segal said. “We literally turned over packing crates, stacked up the merchandise and went into business. We just thought that was nothing special. Of course, everyone walked in and was amazed that these two young kids were starting this business, that we could find French pottery and Swedish glass and Danish flatware and bring it to a small, little street in Chicago called Old Town. It was really crazy, when I think back, that we felt that we could import product into a little 1,700 sq. ft. store.”
Maybe your discussions about the economy are solutions oriented, and perhaps it has you thinking creatively about how to make this year even better. But if you’re not, then you’re better off not knowing at all. Stick your head in the sand, and get to work making making sure your marketing and sales team are the best they can be.
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