Too Long to Plan is No Good Plan

Something that quite amazed me over the last 5 years would be the number of hours an average employee spends during meetings at work. Forgive me if I am wrong, but let’s take few minutes off to think and answer ourselves do we really need so many meetings? And what’s more funny is the fact that few meetings take place just to schedule another meeting. I mean do people love having meeting so much?

In my world of business, meetings only happen when you have to take a decision. Mistake me not, by decision I don’t mean any call that you take during office hours. Lets agree that in the 9 hours that we spend at work, as a productive team we would take at least 10-12 small and big decisions. I don’t mean those. NO WAY! Any decisions that do not make any significant difference on the core objective of the team including but not limited to the vision, mission and goals of the organization / department does not qualify for meeting. In any other scenarios, employees as the owners of the individual tasks should provide inputs and do as expected from an employee if they were the Managers. Of course, Managers should let employees to take decisions and risks occasionally even if you as a Manager have to do little damage control or fix few things to bring the rail back to the track.

One of the most important reasons why Managers fail to deliver or are not able to take quick and bold decisions in the corporate world today is the fear of failure. The same fear of failure leads to procrastinate the decision-making process, which could then result in loosing potential opportunity to a competitor. You had the opportunity to make it big by acting fast, you had the opportunity to stay ahead of your competitor but you waited, you waited for the correct 100% information and I know no one who had 100% information of everything before he took a call. You know why? How the hell in the world do you know how much is 100%?

What every Manager needs to know is to answer the most important information he would need to take that critical decision fast, select the best option from the set of, at least, 3 alternatives and implement it.

The reason for me to always advocate for fast decision-making is because of the advantage that you would have when you get to start as quick as possible. The difference you would find by implementing the best plan and a good plan is very insignificant when compared with the advantage of being the FIRST choice in the market, among the customers.

To put it simpler, you can apply as much science as you want sitting at the shore but once you jump into the sea the world is different. This is the same situation. So, its much better to jump into the sea, make few errors which you can not avoid anyway in the business world rather sitting at the shore with your very best plan. And trust me, things could be really very exciting!