ABCD

The phrase, Always Be Connecting Dots, is widely attributed to Richard Branson and circulates as a Virgin operating principle across business blogs and LinkedIn carousels. No primary source for the line in his own voice (a Branson interview, post, or book chapter) has been located, so the attribution here is “Various” rather than Branson. The underlying distinction also shows up in Seth Godin’s “Connecting dots (or collecting dots)” (Seth’s Blog, April 15, 2014): we spend more time collecting dots than connecting them, yet connection is where the value lies.

The underlying idea predates the slogan. Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement address, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards”, is the canonical version: connection is always retrospective. ABCD is the operating instruction that follows from that: keep looking backward, repeatedly, at the dots you already have. The connection you missed last quarter might be obvious against this quarter’s data.