Adrie's Blog

Assumptions

When I was reading a book on a recent flight, I came across the word "assumption" in a paragraph about someone reporting to Napoleon that something had gone wrong - simply because he had "assumed" something that turned out to be incorrect...

When I read that, all manner of examples popped into my brain from the time I was building my first companies. It happened all too often that you called the person responsible for a failure to justify their actions and they came up with the "I had assumed that...." excuse. Almost always a negative explanation and of course it also indicated that they simply hadn't thought things through. With the "I assumed that" phrase people want to create the impression they have thought about it, but that is almost never the case.
It's a totally different matter if something goes wrong, when someone has taken the time to think it over and calculated the risks. Although not ideal, I can understand that things do happen differently sometimes. If you want to continue to grow, you have to take risks, and it wouldn't be called a risk if it always turned out just as you planned.

A variation on this theme is that many people in large corporates avoid taking risk as a way to work their way up the career ladder unhindered. Taking initiative, with the risks that usually implies, is just not rewarded in a corporate environment - whereas failure does get punished. This generates a totally different breed of person then you might expect in a small company. And of course, there is the (small) group of people taking unbelievable risks with the companies they run, purely out of self interest and greed and not caring about the impact on their direct environment. Strangely enough these people rarely seem to be challenged nor often having to pay back the money they unjustly gained.

Assuming something is always wrong - taking risks provided you do so on a calculated basis, can be good if all aspects of the company strategy is taken into account.

One final interesting issue is that so many "managers" come to see you in your office with the words that they have a problem, or would like your opinion on something. Next they will explain the problem, and then expect you to over from there without them even trying to come up with a possible solution themselves. This particular attitude amongst managers always had my special interest as it said something about the manager. My stock answer would be "What do you think?" after which I would give them a short period of time to think about it and come up with three possible answers.

I so often see entrepreneurs doing the work of their managers, instead of giving them the responsibility. Don't get into the habit of doing the work that you are paying a manager to do for you - it stumps the growth of your organisation and you have a manager you don't need.