Managing YourSelf - Part V

One of the most important parts of business management is managing yourself. It’s not about managing the business but, it’s about organizing your life so you can accomplish the things that are important.

There are five key critical lessons that I have been posting here one lesson for each day. Click here, if you missed Part I on Thursday; here for Part II on Friday; here for Part III on Saturday and here for Part IV yesterday. 

And, now the last lesson in this mini-series:

#5. “Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system—of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on the facts.” And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.”

The best decision makers don’t make many decisions. They focus on the ones that are important and the ones only they can solve. How can they do this?

Most situations are generic and have a standard solution. Once you understand this and know the standard solutions you can cut through the easy problems and focus on the few unique problems that really require effort.

The effective executive does not need to make many decisions. Because he solves generic situations through a rule and policy, he can handle most events as cases under the rule; that is, by adaptation. “A country with many laws is a country of incompetent lawyers,” says an old legal proverb. It is a country which attempts to solve every problem as a unique phenomenon, rather than as a special case under general rules of law. Similarly, an executive who makes many decisions is both lazy and ineffectual. The decision-maker also always tests for signs that something atypical, something unusual, is happening; he always asks: “Does the explanation explain the observed events and does it explain all of them?; he always writes out what the solution is expected to make happen—make automobile accidents disappear, for instance—and then tests regularly to see if this really happens; and finally, he goes back and thinks the problem through again when he sees something atypical, when he finds phenomena his explanation does not really explain, or when the course of events deviates, even in details, from his expectations.