Are You the ‘Gyan Papi’ of your dreams and strategies?
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
September 6th, 2008
As you will be well aware, execution of strategy is one of the rarest of successes in business. Indeed, it is a well established idea that only about twenty percent of all change projects/initiatives fulfil their promise.
Enter Gyan Papi. It is a Bangla word which literally means “Knowledge Sinner” and refers to the idea of a person having knowledge but not acting according to that knowledge. As David Maister puts it so well in his book ‘Strategy and the Fat Smoker’:
“We often know what we should be doing and why – just as fat smokers know they should stop smoking and lose weight. Real strategy lies not in deciding what to do, but in devising ways to ensure we do more of what we know we should do”.
What a timely reminder to us Gyan Papis of the world!!
Tags: David+Maister, gyan papi, knowledge+sinner, strategy
