Page 31 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

11 THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAIL

Never mind what they say—it often actually pays to sweat the small
stuff because, as Franklin says, ‘adviseth to circumspection and care,
even in the smallest matters, because sometimes a little neglect may breed
great mischief’

The business guru Richard Carlson was the one who advised us ‘don’t
sweat the small stuff’ but, as fine as that advice may sometimes be, it
should really go straight out the window when it comes to websites,
communications and all sorts of promotional material.

DEFINING IDEA…
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
~ ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, BRITISH MATHEMATICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER

Back in the mid-90s the web dragged itself out of the primeval swamp of
the Internet, and promptly evolved into a nerd playground complete with
eye-popping games and porn. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that the
business world still retains a highly ambivalent attitude to it to this day. A
great many company websites were initially knocked together by some
employee’s kid brother working in a back bedroom. All credit to the
pioneering spirit of those armies of nascent geeks, but their legacy is that
companies a) expect to pay for all sorts of webbery in pizzas and diet coke,
b) impose a very different quality threshold on electronic material than they
would for a printed brochure or other literature they were sending out, and
c) still have terrible websites that look like they were knocked up by a
sleep-deprived teenager.

Benjamin Franklin was understandably ignorant of the wonders of HTML,
TCP/IP and Flash animation but he nonetheless made points that are as
relevant in the digital domain as they were then. It’s just that he illustrated
the point with horse-shoe nails rather than pixels.‘For want of a nail the
shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and for want of a
horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for