a blog by Woody Hutsell, http://www.appICU.com
Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, the advisors to the empire crowned a prince and proclaimed that he would soon be king. These advisors were known throughout the realm and therefore trusted. They regaled the adoring masses with the conquests of this pure prince – dragons slayed, damsels rescued, and crises averted. While the public was cynical at first, the stories about the pure prince were very convincing. The accolades from one advisor were soon amplified by another and then another until there were almost no dissenters. Who could possibly want to be the only advisor that was not a supporter of the future king?
As time passed, the other princes in the land grew suspicious. A very few observers noticed that the pure prince was being credited for dragons slayed and damsels rescued that never happened. But the prince did not deny what the adoring advisors were saying about his conquests, because he understood that the true battle was a matter of perception. It was about the myths that preceded the prince into combat. And because many believed it so, their gold and their support was rapidly flowing toward the pure prince, leaving some princes without the resources they needed to compete.
Eventually the pure prince made his play for the throne. His accountants and prophets detailed his conquests and ledgers. And while the wins in battle were impressive, they were far fewer than all had been led to believe. And the amount of gold spent to win those battles was breathtaking. A king running the empire or a company doing business with this strategy would surely go bankrupt. And thus the pure prince’s own accountants exposed, in a way that discredited the adoring advisors, how he was not what the advisors had made him out to be. With the eyes of the once adoring advisors now opened and the pure prince needing to curtail his spending, the competing princes rallied.
The perception of pure success had been exposed as illusion. The pure prince was nothing more, and maybe something less, than any other prince. The competing princes were suddenly more visible on the battlefield of the marketplace where gold in hand, constant struggle, endless innovation, a capricious bit of Luck, but not the obscuring mist of hype would ultimately crown the victor.
And so the princes all rode forth into battle. But the many prophets and advisors did not. As they had for generations, they hid behind the smoke of industry and the sound and fury of competition…watching and waiting to leap forth at the first opportunity to once again crown a new prince and prepare him for the throne…
appICU 
Pure genus…the storyteller, not the prince!