The French poet Paul Valery once remarked that “Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.”

If you subscribe to this belief, you can’t escape an important conclusion — that business is not a science. There are no recipes that are always successful or consistently lead to predictable outcomes when it comes to making money.

People have become billionaires from companies that have never made a profit. Sometimes increasing prices increases sales, other times it decreases them. We shouldn’t over extend our brand we’re told, but Aerobie — who made the Frisbee-like flying disc I played with as a kid — expanded into making the Aeropress pneumatic coffee machine that sells in the millions.

And yet, both theorists and practitioners in business typically fail to distinguish between the appearance of science, and the reality of it. Crunching data doesn’t make business a science. Highfalutin academic articles don't make it a science. Using technical sounding jargon doesn’t make it a science.

The sooner we accept that nothing is guaranteed to work, the more comfortable we become with taking risks and trying stuff out.

#strategy #startups

See this post on LinkedIn