A lesson for the recession
by Fred on 19/11/09 at 4:01 pm
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Regular readers of Ideate may have noticed I refer to the book “Good to Great” a lot. Written by Stanford Business Professor Jim Collins, it’s a seminal work that I reckon ought to be read by every business owner. One of the defining lessons in it is from a chapter entitled ‘The Stockdale Paradox” where Collins refers to a conversation with Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale (no kidding). This from Wikipedia:
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Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp.
“I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
When Collins asked who didn’t make it out, Stockdale replied:
“Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Stockdale then added:
“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
Witnessing this philosophy of duality, Collins went on to describe it as the Stockdale Paradox.
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In other words: Don’t be a blind optimist; be a faith-driven realist.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.
