4
The Shadow Side of Strategy
Most of us operate based on a worldview that business is a rational enterprise. We believe that the essential nature of business can be understood through the analysis of revenues, costs, market share, and other metrics of performance. Executives, according to this worldview, are mostly objective decision-makers. Though their judgment may be clouded or biased from time to time, we assume that the decisions they reach are largely rational.
Based on my experience, I don’t believe this is the case. We are better served by flipping our normal way of thinking about things on its head. Rationality is an achievement in business, not the norm.1 As we saw in the case of Paul, the North American president at Dividio, whose ...
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