I had a particularly embarrassing experience in my college days when I was driving home to Maine from Utah over a break with a friend. Somewhere in Nebraska, in the dead of night, my friend had shaken me awake at a pit stop and asked if I'd drive. So I slid in behind the wheel with a full tank of gas and we got back onto I-80.
At first light my friend woke up and said, "thanks for taking over last night - I was really tired. Hey... is that the sun coming up behind us?" Oops.
Hey - what's a couple of hundred extra miles between friends? After all, on a trip that long it's just a rounding error right?
That argument didn't work back then either. But my friend was gracious enough to leave me an out: when I said I thought I'd followed the signs, he offered, "well, I guess the signs were wrong."
I was reminded of this experience when reading an anecdote in psychiatrist Gordon Livingston's Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart:
Once, a long time ago, I was a young lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division, trying to orient myself on a field problem at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As I stood studying the map, my platoon sergeant, a veteran of many junior officers, approached. "You figure out where we are, lieutenant?" he asked. "Well, the map says there should be a hill over there, but I don't see it," I replied. "Sir," he replied, "if the map don't agree with the ground, then the map is wrong."
Over the many years I have spent listening to people's stories, especially all the ways things can go awry, I have learned that our passage through life consists of an effort to get the maps in our heads to conform to the ground on which we walk.
I probably don't have to belabor the obvious metaphors here with our mental models - those useful abstractions that are like maps with which we navigate the social, political and economic landscapes.
The question is, if you have a bad mental model, what is the equivalent of the sun rising behind you when you thought you were going East? What is the North Star that orients you to reality when your mental map is wrong so that you can adjust before that happens?
In MBM this is where our Guiding Principles become quite handy. We can use them as a general standard against which we can test any particular rule, prescription, or action for consistency.
For example, as Principled Entrepreneurs (tm) we are committed to maximizing long-term profitability by creating real value in society while faithfully conducting all of our affairs lawfully and with integrity. So, in everything we do, we always ask, "does this create real value?"
As humans, we have an enormous capacity for denial. So failing to ask, "does what I am doing really create value?" will often quickly lead to seeing the sun rising in the rearview mirror of your venture -- otherwise known as a loss on your P/L.
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