I heard a story about a medical student who was doing his residency with an OB/Gyn practice. He was assigned to an old doctor who had delivered babies every day for decades. The resident was called into the maternity ward while he was doing his rounds one night. A mother was about to give birth and the resident would have the opportunity to deliver his first baby. As he nervously gowned up, he tried to remember everything he had learned about giving instructions to the mother, how to gently feel for the head of the baby as it crowned in the birth canal, how to turn the shoulders of the child so it could be easily delivered. As the resident gave the orders to push during a contraction, he found that the baby was not moving. He went through his routine again. He felt the head of the baby, waited for the next contraction, and in a soothing voice told the mother to push. She gave it her all, but nothing happened. Panic began to fill the room. "What should we do, Doctor?” a nurse queried. The resident did not have a clue. He thought back to all of the books he had read, all of the lectures he had heard. In his mind he went through all of his notes. "This should be working,” was all he could say.

All at once, the old doctor entered the room. He felt the baby’s head and exclaimed, "That’s not a head, it’s a butt! The baby is breech. Give me a scalpel!” In a matter of minutes, he had performed a C-section to deliver the child.

The point of the story is this; theory is great, but practice is better. The same can be said of many things in life, particularly in business. Too often, textbook theories do nothing for the practitioner. Textbooks are written with a high degree of utopian fiction attached to them. Take your typical classroom business 101 assignment: Put a group of people together and create a business plan. Every once in a while, one of these groups will click. The members get excited about the assignment. They get good grades and praise from their professor. They begin to think they can make something of the classroom assignment and they decide to launch a real business. But enthusiasm and good ideas do not fund a start-up business, money does. Most of these ventures fall apart with the first question: how are we going to pay for all of this? They are completely dissolved once the second question is asked: who is going to pay us?  Creating a trusting relationship with clients who are willing to pay you for your hard work takes time and a lot of effort. There is no shortcut.

Where theory works is when we adapt it for use with the practical realities of business, not the other way around. I was sitting in on a board meeting with one of my clients. The company was owned by a parent corporation that had populated the board with junior executives. Someone in the parent corp. thought it would be a good experience for the up-and-comers in the organization, but quite honestly, none of them looked at it that way. It was clear within the first minute that they did not want to be there, listening to reports with absolutely no interest. The general manager had asked me to come along and help him make a presentation. He wanted to move the business to a new location that was much more visible, was bordered by two of the most traveled streets in the city, and had ample parking for their clients. Their current location was in the basement of the building the parent company occupied. Clients had to walk past the corporate break room and mail center to meet with my client. It was an awkward set up. I made my presentation, stating that I believed we could capitalize on the new location to make the market more aware of the company. It would also give the impression to clients that this was a real company, not just a division of the parent who got stuck in the corner of the basement.

One board member decided he would take me to task, but honestly, who could argue with the visibility argument. I thought he would ask a question about how long it would be before the company could recoup their moving expenses and additional rent at the new location. Instead, he asked me a question about marketing theory, in particular about market segmentation. "I learned in my MBA class that market segmentation is extremely important,” he interjected. "Have you done a market segmentation study for this move?” he asked.

Huh? Market segmentation has to do with defining a target market. You look for unique and exclusive demographics that define a group of people who might be more apt to buy your products or services. Mothers of pre-school-aged children or men over the age of 65 who drink more than two cups of coffee a day are examples of market segments. The theory behind market segmentation is very useful if you are trying to define a target market and do some research on its particular buying habits. But nearly everyone who would drive past the new location would say it had better visibility versus the corner of the basement, regardless of market segmentation.

I really did not want to make the guy look like a buffoon in front of his peers, so I simply smiled and said that I had not done a market segmentation study, but did not think it was necessary. "What?” he responded. "Are you suggesting that what I learned in my MBA class was irrelevant?” Not unless you use it in a relevant situation. And that is where practice and theory can intertwine quite nicely. But you must always lead with the practical, not the theory.