Monday, March 12, 2012

Leaders make decisions and then make them right.

We need to stop spending so much time trying to make the right decisions and instead start spending our time making decisions and then making them right.  ~Rory Vaden

Have you ever been stuck in a decision loop?  You keep circling back because there are too many options, or the perfect choice isn’t standing out from all of the other options?  Or maybe you’re thinking one decision will make your life easier than the other decisions so you want to identify that choice.

You might think that Rory Vaden is suggesting the “quick fix” approach to decision making.  Actually, he’s suggesting just the opposite.  This quote comes from a book authored by Rory entitled, Take the Stairs.  He argues that there is one specific value that is diminishing in modern culture: self-discipline.  We’re looking for immediate satisfaction and we live in a shortcut society.  So when faced with the option of the stairs or an elevator, 95% of us will take the easier option and forego the stairs.  Rory states:
Ask an Olympic athlete.  Read Michael Jordan’s autobiography.  Listen to what Peyton Manning says is his secret.  They all attribute their successes more to having the self-discipline to work harder and push farther in practice than to an innate talent.  Sure, people who achieve greatness in any endeavor might be blessed with some natural talent; and sure, timing and luck play a part.  But as Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated in his book Outliers, there’s no substitute for hard work—10,000 hours of it, to be exact!
Getting back to decision making, if we’re honest, how many of us make a decision and then expect the outcome to somehow mysteriously materialize, because after all, we made the decision.  Many times we spend very little time (due to lack of self-discipline) making our decisions right. 

Let me illustrate.  I frequently spend hours upon hours with an organization’s leadership developing a strategic plan.  Making decision after decision about where the organization intends to head in the next few coming years.  Yet, far too frequently, it stops there.  The decision is made but then little to no intentional effort is made to make all those decisions right.  In other words, they look for the metaphorical elevator and skip the stairs.  Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are nothing.  Planning is everything.”  As I see it, plans are essentially a decision but planning is the self-discipline to make it right.

Here we are in mid-March.  How many of us started the year with making decisions about what we would change, do, accomplish, achieve, etc. in 2012?  How many of us have already abandoned those decisions?  Is it because they were not the right decisions?  Or is it because we have lost our self-discipline to make them right?

As Rory suggests, imagine what our lives and organizations would look like if we shifted some of our time making right decisions to time spent making our decisions right?  What if we had the self-discipline to take the stairs?  For Rory, it’s more than a metaphor.  He, literally, really does choose to take the stairs as a visible reminder to himself and others that it’s not the quick fix, easy way, or short-cut that leads to success; it’s the self-discipline to make decisions right. 

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