UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

Sometimes, we want the impossible to change its mask and emerge as the possible. Sometimes, we know we are deceiving ourselves: that in spite of the fantasy we indulge in, the grand metamorphosis will not occur. We can pray to the heavens for 1,000 years, promise every kind of sacrifice in return for our dream, light candles against the western sky but the impossible remains stubbornly locked in its place.

In the beginning and in the end life boils down to sets of numbers. Oh, the poets will protest, I know, but there is a cold, hard reality here that is all about digits, specifically the ambitions and the fears they unleash.

In fact, the sets of numbers are at war with one another and we, as the people surrounded and swayed by them, must figure out how to put them in their place and order them in line with our priorities.

In business today, everyone wants metrics. Prove to me with mathematical precision that the initiative you want to undertake will work. Will generate high ROI. From day one.

Sorry to rain on the fairy tale, but there is no such thing. Not if you want to grow, to innovate, to build an enterprise that takes the world by surprise, by storm, while everyone else is playing around with cookie cutter, paint by numbers, spreadsheet business strategies.

I used to have lunch with an editor at Fairchild publications years ago. A monthly thing where we would talk about everything and nothing at all. She was a free spirit with an x-ray mind and I loved to dabble in her off-the-wall observations.

The gem of her insights came one fine spring afternoon as we were sharing a pizza at a trattoria in SoHo. The place was one of those social meteors that soar across the New York scene, attract the kind of power brokers who don’t feel powerful unless they are in the company of men and women they perceive to be perched high above them on the business hierarchy.