06/ 01/ 2005
by Harvey King
You’ll thank me one day for this column. Actually, you probably won’t. But saying things like, “You’ll thank me one day,” has become so much of a tried and true way for me and other small-business people to talk that, well, when I can’t think of how to say something in a business meeting, I usually resort to picking some low-hanging fruit. Unfortunately, the older I get, the more I realize that just because something is tried doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be true, and low-hanging fruit can be rotten to the core.
It’s taken me a long time to learn that business clichés can be wrong a lot of the time. For instance, I’ve learned that time doesn’t always fly. And despite my wishing that “perception is reality,” I’ve learned that perception is not reality. Indeed, I’ve learned that whenever I start perceiving perception as reality, I usually prove there’s no fool like an old fool.
One of the great things about traveling around the block a time or two is having the experience of actually leading a horse to water and making it drink. I’ve also seen things go up and never come down.
I’ve learned that what you see is not always what you get, and what doesn’t kill you doesn’t always make you stronger: Sometimes it makes your future judgment weak and gives you post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve learned that two heads are not always better than one, and that at the right temperature, pots will boil even if they’re watched.
In other words, I’ve lost a lot of faith in the dependable business clichés I use. The older I get, the more I realize those trusty truisms are often misleading—of course that goes without saying.
Don’t get me wrong. I still use clichés, I’ll admit. How else could I convince myself it’s better to prepare a lot of PowerPoint slides than to actually prepare a really good presentation if I didn’t have a cliché to convince myself that a bad PowerPoint picture is worth a thousand words?
I’m trying hard to kick my cliché habit, because I know the importance of using common sense to run a business—and not just conventional widsom. And I’m hopeful I can do it, because the other day, I actually taught my old dog a new trick.
