There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide humanity into two kinds of people and those who don't.
If you are the first kind of person, you will find the rest of this article somewhat irritating and may want to leave me a cranky comment in the space below.
If you are the second kind of person, you either already agree with my top ten reasons or else have your own top ten reasons which you may feel inspired to note in the space below in your heroic attempt to counter the objections made by the aforementioned people in the first group.
Or neither. Or both. Or maybe you're just waiting for the results of yesterday's focus group.
THE TOP TEN REASONS WHY THE TOP TEN REASONS DON'T MATTER
1. If you need more data to prove your point, you'll never have enough data to prove your point.
2. Being unreasonable is often an innovator's biggest advantage.
3. Analysis paralysis.
4. You already know what to do.
5. You're going to follow your gut, anyway.
6. "Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts." (Einstein)
7. By the time you put your business plan together, the market has already passed you by.
8. "Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives." (Carlos Casteneda)
9. The scientific method came to Rene Descartes in a dream!
10. "Reason" is your clever little strategy for explaining the decisions you've already made with your gut. Not that there's anything wrong with "reason," mind you -- it's just highly overrated. Like Six Sigma, for example. Or having been afraid of doing something risky in high school because others kept telling you it was going to end up on your "permanent record."
Mitch Ditkoff is the Co-Founder and President of Idea Champions, a Woodstock-based innovation consultancy and training company. Among other things, he once taught the "Breakthrough Thinking" module as part of GE's Six Sigma Black Belt program, inspiring him to write The Six Sigma Blues. Mitch, by the way, is capable of reasoning, though it does not work with his teenagers.