TownOnline.com - Bedford Minuteman - Opinion & Letters

TownOnline.com - Bedford Minuteman - Opinion & Letters

I always end up sounding contrarian. I'm particularly arrogant to counter anything said about the Red Sox. However, this can be generalized to more than the Sox taking the world series.
All the comments by the nice kids writing essays are rooted in a fallacy. The fact the the Sox could not have taken the world series had they not stuck to it, been united, believed in themselves and the rest of the crap does not mean that these things are what caused them to win. The fact that there can be no B without A, does not mean that A is THE cause for B.
furthermore, I hardly believe you can achieve everything if you believe in yourself and set your mind to it.
coming to think about it, there might be something here to project on case studies too (oops, here goes my grade).
I'm not sure taking an exceptional case, painting a picture of it totally out of context and out of it's environment and going "if you want to succeed, this is what you need to do..." is a serious approach.
perhaps case studies were not intended for that anyway. However, MBA's oftentimes come out of school believing they have (or they are) the silver bullet, because they have seen exactly such a case before. The truth is there are no two similar cases, and the environment in which firms operate is in constant flux. It is perhaps why I find the Porter five forces model more appealing, since it forces one to look at this environment, while other models would have you label resources as valuable or whatnot, enabling you to forget those resources are valuable in a given situation which is always different from the situations you will encounter in real life.