World of Finances

There are plenty of pundits out there claiming that planning your business is a waste of the time you could be using to actually run your business. Of course, we know several reasons why that falsehood is, well, false.

But why does it persist? Is it possible that resistance to business planning is part of a larger cultural attitude that it’s dangerous and humiliating to have to admit you were wrong?

Listening to BP CEO Tony Hayward dodge and duck during last week’s congressional inquiry into the explosion of the Macondo oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, I was struck all over again by our stunning, culture-wide inability to face up to ignorance, failure, and mistakes.

That inability is particularly evident up in the power stratosphere, where admissions of error are made rarer by (among other things) threats of litigation, fear of the wrath of voters or shareholders, and a value system that generally prioritizes certainty and ego over curiosity and humility.

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