DGrant Gibson

‘There’s a certain cadence that you can feel when you spend time hanging any well-run startup company. The management team has to have a bias toward making decisions. They know that a 70% accurate decision made quickly and based on sound principles is better than a 90% decision made after careful consideration.
The startup entrepreneur knows that they’re going to be wrong often. They’re flexible and willing to admit when they’re wrong. They don’t create a culture of punishment for mistakes. They live be the credo that if you’re never making mistakes you’re not trying hard enough’. This is an excerpt from a great article on TechCrunch HERE which speaks to the all important simple task of simply making a decision as quickly as possible.
My favorite boss when I was 21 years old was the Vice-President of a Oil Drilling firm called Baltic Drilling of which I was their only corporate pilot. As the companies pilot, I flew numerous influential business people around a lot, including directors of companies and banks. Many of them were well respected wealthy individuals. In my travels, many times I was part of the inside team, eating and listening to them speak of daily business concerns and problems. The one problem my boss expressed over and over was the inability of certain people placed in a management role to make key decisions quickly based on their own judgement. My boss vocally expressed his anger and was on the verge of firing a newly minted person raised to a supervisor position due to his inability to make quick sound decisions. The supervisor phoned his boss every time to get his opinion of daily stuff that needed to be tackled by the supervisor without any additional input. As my boss stated, that is why I placed him to the position of supervisor, to make decisions and get this stuff done. He knew the supervisor would make some bad decisions but as he stated, ‘no decision is worse than a bad decision, and, making more and more decisions teaches you to make better ones each time’. I learned a very smart lesson that day about the art of making decisions. Just do it, make the decision…
Until the next WebLog, GG