Be Careful What You Wish For

People don't think things through. I don't know why; it just seems to be a common human characteristic.

If you've ever driven relentlessly toward a goal, been disappointed at the outcome, then had your spouse or friend say, "Well, what the hell did you expect?" then you know what I'm talking about.

There are loads of warnings about this sort of thing all through history, but none of it seems to have done us any good. The first reference goes all the way back to Aesop, c. 550 BC, "We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified."

While the effects of life's most insidious gotcha can run the gamut from comedic to tragic, in business, it's almost never a good thing. Sure, you can chalk it up to learning from experience, which is a good thing. There are only two problems with that:

1. People who take big risks with other people's money and livelihoods - like entrepreneurs and executives - are often remarkably resistant to learning from experience, and
2. If you drag hoards of shareholders, employees, and customers down the rat-hole with you, they could care less what you learned for next time. For them, there is no next time.

There once was a microprocessor company named Cyrix. Cyrix thrived as a lower-cost alternative to Intel's chips, but when founder and CEO Jerry Rogers decided to make it his mission in life to outdo the chip giant with a tiny fraction of its resources, well, he got what he wished for ... and it nearly bankrupted the company.

Then, National Semiconductor's new CEO, Brian Halla, acquired Cyrix for $600 million to make its processors the centerpiece of a bold strategy to proliferate so-called information appliances. But guess what came free with the deal? A new competitor named Intel. National lost over $1 billion the following year and ultimately had to sell Cyrix off in pieces.

• Entrepreneurs. In Advice for Budding Entrepreneurs we talk about the benefits of finding a mentor, a partner, or like-minded people for support and to bounce ideas around. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs tend to be skeptics who keep their own counsel and don't easily trust others. All I can say to that is that someone in the above story fits that description to a tee and, well, it didn't work out so well.
• Managers, executives, business owners. You can sort of boil all this down to the underlying problem of an oversized ego that makes you think everything's going to work out for the simple reason that you're special. Well, you're not. These posts will help with that problem: 7 Signs You May be a Bad Manager, 7 Signs You're a Bad Business Owner, Why You Need a Second-in-Command.
• Everyone else. Brilliant, charismatic visionaries, entrepreneurs, and executives are a double-edged sword. By getting swept up in the power and enthusiasm of meaningful events, you're implicitly agreeing to certain terms, most notably that you're taking a big risk. While I think that's a good thing, it's also a good thing to be aware of it and to set your expectations accordingly.

Image Flickr user Mykl Roventine