Even seemingly innocuous terms he had taken for granted took on opposite meanings. Finding himself confused during a meeting, he finally realized that when businesspeople use the term “burn rate,” they are referring to the amount of cash being used up and they want to keep it to a minimum. For a baseball pitcher, “burn rate” is the speed at which you can throw the ball—the higher the burn rate, the better. After grappling with each confusion, Curt struggled to figure out his disconnect and begin adjusting his mental model, only to find further disconnects between his old mental model and his
...more
