In my decade long management consulting career, I have dealt with 100s of clients from top
multinational organizations.
And amongst those clients, I noticed that most of them would fit in either of the 2
categories.
First type was, the one who would want to make sure he has all the information available
before making a decision and sometimes this process would drag for months or sometimes
even years and the second type was complete opposite.
The 2nd type was someone would make a decision, a very important one in a simple 2 minute
conversation usually even without the facts.
Now, in this episode, I want to talk about knowledge and the consequences of decisions.
Now, both of these types of managers are wrong.
They are not wrong for making a decision in 5 minutes or for the type A in months or years.
The reason why they are wrong is because they don't consider the gravity of the consequence
and the desired outcome.
What do I mean by this?
Let's put this two parameters in a chart and let's see what I mean.
Now as you see from the chart, going past a certain point without a decision is a decision
itself.
You just made a decision not to make a decision.
The problem here is in most industries, it's usually too late and the parameters will change
as time goes by.
Meaning, the more you wait, the more datapoints you need for the changed circumstances.
Yeah Deniz of course.
I know that.
Everybody knows that.
Apparently, not Nokia.
This is one of the reasons why Nokia failed.
In their last shareholder meeting, their CEO said; We didn't do anything wrong, but somehow
we failed".
He was wrong.
He did something wrong.
He made a wrong decision.
The decision to wait until they have more data about the smart phone market was the
wrong decision.
They had the technology and the infrastructure.
But they wanted to make sure that the smartphone market was not a fad.
It was going to stay.
They wanted to collect more datapoints and see the customer approvals of this new technology
before they invested in touch screen.
That's where they did wrong.
So, now in this case, Nokia incurred actual cost, reduction in sales.
But for most of us, we don't manage such huge corporate organizations right?
For us, usually the cost of delaying a decision comes in the form of an opportunity cost.
Should I hire a new team member, a new agency for marketing, a management consultant to
solve a problem, should I launch this new project,…
see the further you delay these decisions, the further it'll take to reap the benefits.
And in most cases, not all, but in most cases the consequence of making a wrong decision
is usually less than not making one.
See you next week!
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét