The Ten Commandments for Business Failure by Don Keough

Author:Don Keough
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Self-Help
ISBN: 1591842344
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2008-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

3. Not Taking Time to Think Is Just Plain Foolish—Even Dangerous

“ ‘Forward the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldiers knew

Someone had blundered:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the Valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.”

—Alfred Lord Tennyson

THE LIGHT BRIGADE went charging into the Valley of Death because its leaders just didn’t pause to think. And all the soldiers blindly followed. Soldiers were not supposed to think for themselves, but their leaders were. It’s obvious, but worth noting—one cannot make any real progress in any field, war included, if one just keeps sifting through data and reaches quick conclusions based on previous experience rather than careful evaluation and slow, careful analysis.

Time to think is not a luxury. It is a necessity. As Goethe noted: “Action is easy; thought is hard.” Yet action frequently—in fact, more often than not—takes on a life of its own. We pay homage to reason, but we are held hostage to emotion. We are, after all, feeling creatures, and in the excitement of a particular endeavor once the ball is rolling, it’s difficult to stop. There is a tendency toward group wishing in decision making wherein everyone is so eager to make something happen that straight thinking becomes almost impossible.

In the field of mergers and acquisitions, multimillion even billion-dollar deals get under way and the momentum builds, the rivalries among the players come to the fore, the game—and a game it becomes—goes ahead, no holds barred. Someone is determined to win! They can taste it! All the cash lying on the table, all the supposedly solid rationale behind the deal, all the people involved—nothing matters except winning! “I want my way,” says the biggest ego in the room! There are dreams of being in the press conference spotlight and big headlines in the Wall Street Journal. It’s all too glamorous and we convince ourselves that the numbers do add up—even when they are about as sound as astrological predictions. The “animal spirits” that John Maynard Keynes wrote of are more powerful than most businesspeople would like to admit.

Look at the recent dreadful fits—Daimler and Chrysler, Time Warner and AOL, Kmart and Sears, Quaker Oats and Snapple. Should these really have ever happened? The less than satisfactory results were wholly predictable, but people were swept up in the deal, and no one, top to bottom, thought through the consequences or the consequences of the consequences. Certainly, the short-term gain to various players is always going to be a factor, but there must be someone projecting ahead to the long-term consequences for the welfare and dignity of all the stakeholders in every business activity.

Unless somebody stops to think… it’s easy to make the same mistakes over and over. And that is a sure prescription for failure. When there is a failure of some kind, begin looking around to assign blame or make excuses or punish somebody. That way you won’t step back to take the time to really analyze the failure.

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