we used to say what you don’t know won’t kill you.  Maybe it will.

Knowing our blind spots may well be something that entrepreneurs and managers should increasingly become more aware of.

For Managers, Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

About two years before he died, Peter Drucker told an interviewer that among the things he regretted in the course of his long and productive career was not writing a book—it would have been his 40th—called Managing Ignorance. He added, tantalizingly, that it was bound to have been his best, but otherwise he didn’t elaborate.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about Drucker’s work-that-wasn’t, wondering what such a volume might have explored. Most likely, it seems, Drucker was interested in figuring out how those running corporations and other institutions could get their arms around what they don’t know (which, of course, tends to greatly outweigh what they do know). “As significant as the problem of organizing knowledge was,” noted John Flaherty in Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, “he considered the organization of ignorance an even more formidable challenge.”