This post – in which the Business Bro ranted and raved about how premature categorization hurts organizations – made me consider another angle for the problem I was having in February with book previews.
As The BB pointed out, a specific problem with categorization is how it reduces an organization’s ability to take full advantage of new opportunities. If we consider the quality of what I read as a metaphor for an organization’s output, it’s possible to extend The Business Bro’s idea to the issues the preview was causing.
You see, reader, having reading categories meant I was no longer checking out the six best books to read per month. Instead, it meant I was checking out the two best books from each category to read per month. The stratified concept looks similar enough at first to ‘get the six best books strategy’ but when you break it down the results are usually very different. For example, if the six best books available to me in a given month were all ‘light reads’, the system of categories prevented me from reading them all – I would have the two best books from my list plus four more that were outside the top six (two dense reads and two stop-and-go reads).
