I am struck by how often the letter ‘P’ appears as the pneumonic device in many lists about how to do business better.

There is the four P’s of marketing first proposed by Jerome McCarthy in 1960: Price, Price, Place, and Promotion.

Paul Williams at Idea Sandox referred to a construct from Ingrid Bens for staying “tuned-in” to your audience as a leader: Pace, Process, and Pulse.

Brendon Burchard uses them in his 6 Questions for High Performance: Purpose, Presence, Psychology, Physiology, Productivity, and Persuasion.

And then this morning, I got a set of notes from John Spence this morning from his time at Entrepreneurial Masters program at MIT and he says, “To become world class you need the 4 P’s: passion, persistence, practice and pattern recognition.”

I am not a linguistic, but I wonder if there is something about common roots in Latin and Germanic language families that drives the frequency of P’s.