By: Douglas J Utberg

There is a popular belief that knowledge is power.  This sentiment is the motivation behind most programs of education that endeavors to create a more knowledgeable workforce.  It is certainly true that knowledge creates vast potential and opportunity.  But it is also true that there is one major piece that still needs to be added in order for opportunities to be realized.  Knowledge must be accompanied by intelligent action to produce results. This insight is extremely important for the emerging workforce of the twenty first century.  The reasons for this is because there is a growing belief that compensation should be based on what you know, instead of what you do with what you know.

The pervasive impact of this fallacy creates large masses of highly educated people that perpetually complain about the insufficiency of their wages while the creative capacity of their minds lays dormant, because of a terminal unwillingness to act. Typical manifestations of this situation occur when large amounts of people attend ‘boot camp’ seminars on subjects like real estate investing, or stock market investing and then spend large amounts of time and money learning about elaborate strategies, but fail to act on what they have learned.  Another version of this situation happens in the world of large corporations. There is an increasing population of people who focus on ‘strategic vision’ and 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, or 500 year business plans.  However, all of this ‘strategic thinking’ is ultimately useless unless it drives real, tangible action.

This is not to say that people should stumble through life without vision or strategy.  It is not to say that all thoughts of the future are useless and frivolous.  What I am saying is that strategy, vision, and all other forms of long-term thinking are only useful when they are acted upon.  Because of this, we can see that knowledge only represents potential power.  It must be accompanied by intelligent action to produce meaningful results.