Financial Clarity for Entrepreneurs

Question Success

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of “Made to Stick” have an article in this month’s Fast Company titled “Success Can Make You Stupid.”

“If there’s a moral in this story, it’s this: Question success. Success propagates backward in our minds and bestows the glow of wisdom on our every decision. The irony of self-fulfilling prophecies is that even bad ideas end up looking right in the end, because we’ve salvaged them with good execution. And when bad ideas get reinforced, there are consequences: The wrong movies get pushed. The wrong deals get funded. The wrong employees get advanced.”

Chip and Dan describe a process whereby bias toward past successful decisions results in more resources being directed to what is comfortable and known, rather than what is more objectively “right.”

Read the whole thing.

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