When you book a hotel room, the perfect photographs showcased on their website often draw you in. Carefully chosen images feature elegant rooms bathed in sunlight, sparkling amenities, and awe-inspiring views. They present a version of reality that feels like a dream—majestic and flawless. They don’t show you the unkempt hallways, the cramped spaces, or the breakfast room that looks far less appetizing in person. Yet, when you arrive and encounter the less-than-perfect lobby, you shrug it off and head straight to the registration desk. This is cherry-picking at work—an intentional selection of only the best features, hiding everything else beneath the surface. It’s a tactic used by countless industries, from hotels to car dealerships, real estate agents, and law firms. The key here is simple: showcase only what’s appealing and downplay everything else.
You know how it works. You’ve seen it countless times before. Brochures, advertisements, and corporate presentations follow this formula, highlighting success while quietly ignoring failure. But there’s one area where we tend to forget about the cherry-picking game: the world of annual reports, particularly those from companies, foundations, and government organizations. In these settings, we expect objective, transparent depictions of performance. Unfortunately, those expectations are often misguided. These bodies, just like the hotel industry, also engage in cherry-picking. Successes are trumpeted, while shortcomings are conveniently left out of the narrative.
Cherry-Picking in Business: A Pervasive Strategy
The concept of cherry-picking extends well beyond the hotel industry. It is a pervasive strategy companies employ across various sectors, from retail to technology and even service industries. Cherry-picking deliberately highlights only the most attractive, positive aspects of a product or service while conveniently overlooking the more mundane, less glamorous, or outright negative elements. This selective presentation plays on human psychology, leveraging our natural tendency to focus on the good and ignore the bad when making decisions.
Take a look at the marketing efforts of tech companies. When launching a new product, the focus is always on innovation, sleek design, and cutting-edge technology. But what isn’t shown are the bugs, glitches, or limitations that might crop up with the product in real-world use. When Apple releases a new iPhone, it showcases all the beautiful design elements—the polished glass, the elegant interface, the upgraded camera—but rarely will it highlight how long the battery lasts under heavy use or any connectivity issues. Instead, those minor inconveniences get swept under the rug.
This approach is not limited to product advertisements. In real estate, for instance, sellers and agents rely heavily on cherry-picking a property’s best features. Listings are typically adorned with professional photos that capture the property in its best light, taken at the optimal time of day to highlight the views and architectural beauty. What’s often missing, however, are the things that make the property less desirable: the noisy traffic in the neighborhood, the dark, poorly lit corners of rooms, or the outdated plumbing. Buyers often visit homes with inflated expectations, only to feel disillusioned when they experience the property in person. While effective in sparking initial interest, this tactic leads to buyer disappointment when the reality doesn’t align with the curated presentation.
Corporate Cherry-Picking: The Selective Narrative
The concept of cherry-picking becomes particularly pronounced in corporate communications. While companies strive to maintain a positive image and foster consumer confidence, they do so at the expense of transparency. Annual reports, press releases, and casual investor updates are tailored to present an idealized version of a company’s performance. The focus is always on the successes, and struggles or failures are downplayed or omitted.
Annual reports, for example, typically showcase profits, revenue growth, and new initiatives. However, companies often fail to address the challenges they’ve faced or the projects that didn’t meet expectations. A company may announce its expansion into new markets but won’t necessarily disclose the hurdles it encountered along the way, such as underperforming sales or missteps in the expansion strategy. Instead, the narrative is framed as a smooth journey toward success. This selective communication can falsely perceive company health and growth, ultimately misleading investors, stakeholders, and the public.
In corporate governance, cherry-picking plays a role in how senior management communicates with the board and the public. For instance, executives often prioritize the most impressive accomplishments and present challenges as minor setbacks when presenting to the board. Corporate reports emphasize financial milestones such as achieving quarterly revenue targets or securing key partnerships. In contrast, the risks—such as increasing competition, regulatory challenges, or high turnover rates—are often downplayed. By focusing solely on the positive outcomes, companies project an image of continuous growth and stability, masking the underlying risks that could threaten future success.
Presenting a Cherry-Picked Vision: The Power of Selective Storytelling
Anecdotes, particularly personal stories, are powerful tools to cherry-pick an idealized reality. These mini-narratives often humanize a company or a product, making it more relatable and memorable. However, their selective nature makes them particularly dangerous. Anecdotes appeal to the emotional side of human decision-making, bypassing logic and encouraging people to latch onto isolated instances of success, regardless of how unrepresentative they may be.
For example, imagine a company that has received feedback that its new product is overly complicated for most users. The product’s user interface is clunky, and customers are frustrated by its difficulty understanding its features. However, in a meeting with potential investors or clients, the CEO offers an anecdote: “My father-in-law, who’s in his 80s, was able to figure out how to use the device in just 10 minutes.” While touching and relatable, this personal story holds little significance in addressing the broader issue. It presents an exception, not the rule. But because it’s packaged as a story, it has the potential to skew perceptions and make people believe that the product is far simpler to use than it is.
Anecdotes are emotionally charged, and this emotional appeal makes it difficult to challenge or dismiss them. Humans are wired to resonate with stories, and when those stories are framed positively, they can easily overshadow hard data or more comprehensive insights. A single anecdotal success story can become more convincing than a statistical analysis showing that most users have struggled with the product. To counter this, business leaders must develop a keen awareness of how anecdotes are often used to manipulate narratives and remain critical of their influence.
Cherry-Picking in the Elite Fields: The Dangerous Illusion of Authority
Cherry-picking becomes even more dangerous when applied in elite fields like academia, research, and medicine. These sectors are often regarded with reverence and authority, making it all the more difficult to question the narratives presented by those within them. Researchers, scholars, and professionals in these fields are frequently afforded the benefit of the doubt, and their achievements are often held in high esteem. However, the cherry-picking of information within these fields is rampant, as those in positions of authority selectively report their successes while downplaying or ignoring their failures.
In academia, for example, researchers may present their findings in a way that highlights the strengths of their methodologies or the successes of their studies while glossing over the limitations or failures of their work. When a researcher publishes a paper about a breakthrough, it is often framed as the culmination of years of rigorous study, showcasing the brilliance of the methodology and the impact of the findings. What is rarely addressed are the failed experiments, the studies that were abandoned, or the hypotheses that were disproven. Researchers often avoid publishing negative results or inconclusive data, creating a lopsided view of progress in the field. This selective reporting of successes creates an unrealistic perception of progress and advancement, making it appear that the field continually evolves toward more groundbreaking discoveries when, in reality, much of the research is iterative and filled with setbacks.
The same selective storytelling occurs in the medical profession. Medical breakthroughs like antibiotics or vaccines are celebrated as major accomplishments and have undoubtedly saved millions of lives. However, the greatest public health victory of the past century—the campaign to reduce smoking—has received far less recognition. While medical advancements are often celebrated with grandeur, public health campaigns that have led to a significant reduction in smoking rates receive little fanfare despite their undeniable impact on public health. The focus on scientific achievements can overshadow public health advocates’ quieter yet equally important work. This creates a distorted view of medical progress, where it’s easy to overlook the long-term, incremental changes that are often the most impactful.
Corporate Transparency: A Case for Examining the Unspoken Failures
Inside corporate organizations, cherry-picking is evident in external communications and how companies evaluate and report their internal progress. Administrative departments, for example, are skilled at presenting their work in a glowing light, showcasing their successes and contributions to the organization. However, like marketing and public relations teams, these departments tend to gloss over failures or shortcomings. The problem is that many of these failures can provide more valuable insights into an organization’s long-term trajectory than any list of accomplishments ever could.
When companies evaluate their performance, they often focus on the wins—revenue growth, client acquisitions, cost reductions—and avoid discussing the projects that didn’t meet expectations. The abandoned or underperformed projects are quietly swept under the rug, and the internal teams involved in these efforts are rarely held accountable. As a result, the company’s leadership gets a skewed picture of its performance, where only the bright spots are visible. This is why transparency is crucial in fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. Asking about the “leftover cherries”—the initiatives that failed, the goals that weren’t achieved, the strategies that didn’t work—can provide the insight necessary to make real progress.
Supervisory boards, investors, and company executives need to dig deeper and question the successes and failures. The missed targets, the initiatives that didn’t deliver, and the projects that were quietly abandoned are often the keys to understanding an organization’s true health. By focusing on the full picture rather than just the highlights, businesses can learn from their mistakes, adjust their strategies, and ultimately build a more resilient and adaptable organization.
The Dangers of Softened Goals: A Hidden Indicator of Trouble
One of the most insidious forms of cherry-picking is the gradual adjustment of goals to make them easier to achieve. Over time, companies may lower their targets—subtly or overtly—to become more attainable. This can happen in many ways, from shifting timelines lowering expectations, and redefining what success looks like. While this might make the organization appear to be meeting its objectives, it masks deeper issues within the company.
The danger of this practice lies in the fact that it prevents organizations from challenging themselves and striving for true innovation. When goals are constantly adjusted to be more easily achievable, the company stops pushing the envelope and becomes complacent. For example, a sales department that originally set an ambitious target of 10% growth might lower that target to 5% after realizing that the original goal was too difficult to meet. While this makes the goal more attainable, it also means that the department is no longer striving for meaningful growth. Instead, it merely coasts along, avoiding the challenges that could lead to long-term success.
The result of this subtle shift is a gradual erosion of standards. Companies that consistently lower their expectations replace difficult goals with easier ones, or redefine what success means are setting themselves up for stagnation. The true measure of success should be meeting the original targets, not the ability to set new, more achievable ones. When goals are softened, it’s a sign that the organization is no longer committed to pushing itself to new heights, which can have serious long-term consequences for growth and innovation.
Conclusion: Being Aware of Cherry-Picking
The critical takeaway from all of this is that cherry-picking is a pervasive tactic, one that is employed across many areas of life—from business and academia to government and medicine. The challenge lies in recognizing when this tactic is used and learning to question the presented narrative. It’s easy to be taken in by the glossy surface—the triumphs, the success stories, the shiny anecdotes. However, true understanding comes from asking the right questions, delving into the areas often glossed over, and being willing to face failures and setbacks that are just as important as successes.
In a world where cherry-picking is the norm, the real challenge is to dig deeper, look beyond the carefully curated images, and discover the fuller, more complex story beneath the surface. This is the key to making more informed decisions, whether you’re evaluating a hotel, a product, a company, or even an individual’s performance. The truth often lies in what is left out, not just what is highlighted.
This article is part of The Art of Thinking Clearly Series based on Rolf Dobelli’s book.