Challenge the Conventional Wisdom
Small business is the engine that drives America's new economy. In The Engine of America, former administrator of the SBA Hector Barreto reveals the winning business strategies of CEOs from 50 companies. We share an excerpt about the value of "what everybody knows."
Tue, October 02, 2007
CIO — Excerpted from The Engine of America by Hector V. Barreto (John Wiley & Sons, September 2007), $24.95. Copyright 2007 Hector V. Barreto.
Conventional wisdom is a term coined by economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1958 book The Affluent Society, second edition (New York: Houghton & Mifflin, 1958). It is used to describe certain ideas or explanations that have become generally accepted as true. However, conventional wisdom may actually be either true or false.
The Engine of America
Conventional wisdom often stops people in their tracks. This is not necessarily bad. If the conventional wisdom is that a small business will not survive and grow without proper financing—a truism that has been shown to be true countless times—and this rightly should act as a stumbling block to the nascent small business owner who intends to start a venture on a shoestring and hope for the best.
But conventional wisdom should not stand in the way when the belief is based on outmoded facts, wrong premises, or prejudice.
As Galbraith said, "The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas, but the march of events." Take, for example, the conventional wisdom of years gone by that the construction trades are clearly a man's world and that women need not apply.
Linda Alvarado and Mercedes LaPorta have never met. They live over 2,000 miles apart, one in Denver and the other in Miami. Both are the head of successful companies they built from the ground up over many years. The stories of their phenomenal success are so identical that at first glance they seem to be the same story. Although they are not the same story, success stories of very different small businesses often seem to have the same roots.
The success of Alvarado Construction, Inc. and of Mercedes Electric Supply, Inc. have at their core the willingness of two women to follow their dreams and to challenge the conventional wisdom that neither of them had any possible chance of success. Both have found success in different facets of the construction industry, which is notably hostile to women generally. Minorities often face that same hostility in management and ownership. When both women started their businesses more than 20 years ago, women doing what they wanted to do were simply unheard of. The conventional wisdom was not simply that they would fail, but that they were crazy to even begin. However, they each pitted their will against this conventional wisdom and in the end not only succeeded beyond anyone's expectations—including quite probably their own—but, in doing so, also changed their respective industries, both for their gender and for minorities, generally.
