Monday, June 19, 2006

Go For The Wine

Did you find a way to open the bottle of wine? Or did you drink water (see last week)? Based on your comments, I’d say Wunderpeople don’t give up so easily…

Which leads me to this week’s thought…

Theories are critical to new idea development; practice is critical to business success.

See the difference?

Practice is about our daily bread. Yet, if we only have our practice, we get stale; we get old; we get boring. No matter how well we execute, and no matter how well we perform, inevitably something or someone new pops up and passes us by.

On the other hand we have theory:

A comprehensive explanation of a given set of data that has been
repeatedly confirmed by observation and experimentation and has gained general acceptance within the scientific community but has not yet been decisively proven.

And here is the rub. Without practice assimilating the observations and experimentations into our daily work and thinking, making it an ongoing business proposition for us, theory stays just that – something not decisively proven. Nice idea, but don’t bother me. I have a business to run, numbers to meet, goals to achieve…we’ve all heard it before. To that end, hear this one out:

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is.”
- Chuck Reid

Do you see it? Do you agree?

Stay in the theoretical world and you’ll never see what really works, and what doesn’t. Stay theoretical and the theories soon get stale, worn out and hackneyed.

However, turn theory into practice, and you will lose some and win some (more wins I hope), but more importantly, you will have more data points, experience and ideas for the next theory, and the next, and…you get the point.

Opening the wine is turning theory into practical practice; drinking water is discussing the theory.

Go for the wine.

Posted by David on 06/19 at 08:56 AM
(3) Comments • Permalink