I am immersed in and surrounded by goofy, ridiculous ideas every day and for the most part it doesn’t bother me. Nearly every working day I go to a meeting where someone says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!” one of the granddaddies of business lies.
Most of the important things in business can’t be measured, but luckily as human beings who grew up on this planet we are well-equipped to reinforce and cultivate the important things we can’t measure, like trust in our environment and momentum toward our goals.
I hear “Numbers are the language of business,” another howler, all the time, and “In God we trust — all others bring data!” the slogan for fear-based leadership.
I keep my mouth shut. If I stopped to notice and tangle with every barking dog on my path, I’d never get anywhere.
One of the worst business lies is “You can’t teach leadership skills, because leaders are born and not made.” It’s such a lie that it makes me wonder, “Has this lie merely been repeated generation after generation, without anybody being curious enough to conduct an experiment?”
Then it hit me — people believe that you can’t teach leadership skills and that great leaders are born, not made because whenever somebody emerges as a great leader, it’s easy to say, “They were obviously born to lead!”