The Media Supermarket

So you want to loose some weight? The best thing to do, is to look at yourself in the mirror ten times a day. Every morning check out the latest developments on the sides of your belly, your thighs, and anywhere else that loves to accumulate fat. These are the visual results of yesterday’s activities. You should also keep checking your weight three times a day, and make sure you are familiar with the results as much as possible. To be more in touch with results, please check all the clothes that you have and make sure you know which ones still fit and which don’t fit anymore. Focus also on how much you are able to eat as opposed to the past, and how much less exercise you can perform. And keep going like this until you really loose yourself, instead of loosing weight.
This is how you focus on results and results only. This is the “right and professional” way of working. You keep thinking about whatever results you are getting.
Several problems.
First, you cannot control the results, so stop focusing on them. You can’t force people to love your product, or adopt your new technology.
Second, you will create stress in the environment. Instead of looking at the sky and feeling bad about the result (rain), you know what the obvious thing to do is.
Third, you will loose touch with reality and the great opportunities that come with it. The map you have for yourself about the world is necessarily not the most accurate, and you gain better understanding as you go through the process. The more focused you are on the results the more likely you are to miss these opportunities.
Fourth, no learning, no experience. For the same reasons, you are out of touch with the realities, and you will not allow for serendipity to enter your world. You are also shutting yourself out of your ability to contain serendipity in the project. 
In my strategy course in college, we were taught that the proper way of executing a strategy, is to decide on it, and follow through until you achieve it. As a control freak, I had a simple question, “what if we discover half way through, that we don’t have the right strategy?”. I didn’t have the guts to ask that question, but I do now.
Our other class on flexibility in the new market place made sense though.