Business Model

Over the past few years I have heard the name Dave Ramsey time and time again. He has developed a cult following among many professionals, much in the same way as the Maharishi was followed by the Beatles back in the day. I have come across way too many authors who have dropped Mr. Ramsey's name into conspicuous places in their books in an attempt to give their words more weight and to make them look well connected. This occurs even if they only drove through the same town where he happened to be staying. It is really rather perverse.

Years before Dave Ramsey came along, there was another magnetic guru, Peter Drucker, who pulled folks in like the Oracle at Delphi. His name also seems to be liberally sprinkled in far too many books connected with money and business management. I have just finished reading several of these books, and at first I did not have a fat clue as to who Peter Drucker was. A quick glance at wikipedia shows that he was the real deal. He was a university professor who taught into this 90s, and wrote over 40 books in the time span from 1939 to 2008. Pretty serious stuff I would say.

However, even among all the dry and serious discussion about corporate paradigms, business ideologies, and macroeconomic theories, I stumbled across a little nugget that kind of resonated within my brain,

Too much planning can make you deaf to opportunity.

So much of our lives is devoted to making plan after plan to get ahead. No sooner do we leave one plan sitting hastily in the dust then we are off gallivanting with another. It is schizophrenic madness, always relying on the loudest voice in the din to decide how we should act and invest. Yet too much of all this makes us deaf to the real opportunities around us.