---
title: Doing Stupid Things Is A Choice
teaser: A new business mantra for you.
tags: business
author: Matt Jankowski
published_on: 2006-12-01
---

This is the first post in what will be possibly be a 25-part series of business
mantras.  Each day I will select (or possibly create on the spot) a barely
thought out phrase, motto, slogan or saying - back it up with a flimsy
circumstantial account - and steadfastly insist that it's correct, possibly in
the face of evidence to the contrary.

The mantra of today, day one in this twenty five part series, is Doing Stupid
Things Is A Choice.

If you work in a large organization, or for the government, or for a smaller
organization with an inexplicable bureaucracy problem you probably know a person
or a whole team of people within your organization who have a consistently
defeatist attitude about things.  They assume deadlines will slip.  They assume
that work of a sub-par quality will be delivered internally.  They assume that
the messy, complicated and useless processes that exist are just the way things
are and they don't care enough to change them.

Similarly, maybe you've known that there was a right way to do something, but
felt that because of organizational politics or incompetence, you needed to find
a round-about way of getting there usually by doing 10 things wrong first.

These systems don't come into existence by themselves, and they don't perpetuate
themselves either.  Each of these attitudes and views about the way things and
the way things must be is the result of constant decision making that could be
stopped at any moment at all by anyone involved.

No matter what you're doing or why you're doing it you only get one life.  In my
life, accepting failure and incompetence just because that's the way things work
here simply isn't good enough.

So stop making excuses next time you feel resigned to failure because of some
entrenched practice in your organization.  By perpetuating the attitude of
disappointment, you're part of the problem.