By Nathan Kracklauer, Chief Research Officer at Abilitie

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Barry Ritholtz, one of my major influences when it comes to understanding economics and investment, released a new book this year: How Not To Invest.

During the writing process, he was repeatedly told that the “negative framing” makes for a bad title. He didn’t care. His title conveys his main point: For almost all of us, the movements of markets are too deep and complex to anticipate. We are better served not by trying to discover their dark arts but by simply avoiding the basic mistakes that get us into trouble.

This is a general principle that applies in lots of areas. Take cooking. Michelin-starred chefs work wonders of culinary artistry. But they do not feed the world. The world is fed – nutritionally, emotionally, and socially – by hundreds of millions of meals prepared each day by people who get the basics right. Meals that cover the major food groups. Meals that are neither burned nor under-cooked. Meals that bring people together in an ancient social ritual of sharing, giving, and receiving.

Cooking and investment are just two examples of where the excellence of the few may capture our imagination, but it’s the millions – getting the basics right each and every day – who make the world go round.

The same goes for leadership and management.

Maybe there are truly great leaders, leaders whose hard work, talent, and luck have made them the managerial equivalent of a Gordon Ramsay. But the world accomplishes its everyday business thanks to the millions of ordinary managers helping individuals contribute their best, helping teams coordinate their activities, and helping organizations seek out the win-win solutions for all their stakeholders.

Getting the basics right – the management equivalent of neither over nor undercooking pasta – boils down to avoiding a few typical errors: delivering vague, unactionable feedback. Confusing profit and cash flow. Forgetting to design a decision-making process before tackling the decision. Seeing people as nuts to crack rather than as self-moving souls of inviolable dignity.  

A recent LinkedIn post that flowed through my feed compared elite athletes to corporate professionals in terms of the relative amounts of time dedicated to preparation and performance. It’s a useful reminder about how much more preparation we could be doing, and how much a company like Abilitie can help close that gap.  

On the other hand, managers will never devote as high a ratio of preparation to performance as elite athletes. And this isn’t just an economic constraint. A world in which a few super-elite managers do all our organization for us is as absurd and undesirable as a world in which a few super-elite athletes do all our exercise for us. Or where super-elite film-makers so fill the world with content that we have no time or inclination to tell our own stories.

Barry Ritholtz’s wealth management company focuses on helping its clients steer clear of basic investment mistakes, rather than advertising a secret investment formula for getting rich quick.

Similarly, for a leadership development company like ours, the achievable and desirable outcome we can target is helping millions of managers get the basics right. “How Not To Manage” might not have been the most attractive title for our book or our program, but in spirit, that’s what The 12-Week MBA is about.