He preferred to make more observations less carefully, and to get immediate feedback on his models. I have met many many people who have spent lots of money on NLP and had poor results. Needless to say, they are not the cases that they write about in their books. On the other hand I have met many people who have had excellent results. My model of why it works is a bit different that theirs too.
Models are no big deal.
We have models of everything. They are just theories. None of them work all the time, but they are useful. They descriptions of something that do not go into overwhelming detail. If it is something like the weather where the detail is needed, then the models are of limited utility.