Why Can't We Get Anything Done?

Another side effect of fear is that it absolutely retards the flow of information inside a company. So you have this anomaly: Companies pat themselves on the back as knowledge-management businesses, but because nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news, nobody inside those companies knows what the hell is going on. A famous quote by producer Sam Goldwyn sums up that point well: "I want everybody to tell me the truth -- even though it costs him his job."

Yet another side effect is that fear causes individuals to focus only on the short term and on their own survival. I used to teach a case study about a company that made brakes for airplanes. The case described a chain of events in which workers ultimately falsified the performance of the brakes: They filed papers that falsely attested to the brakes' capabilities. I asked my class a question: Why would you falsify documents when you know that there is absolutely no chance of the problem going undetected? Sooner or later, somebody's going to fly in a plane, the brakes are going to fail, and the problem will come to light. It's inevitable! So why lie?

The answer is that if there's enough fear in the workplace, you don't worry about what's going to happen eventually. You don't even worry about what's going to happen tomorrow. You worry only about today: Can I get through today?

8. Talk ain't cheap. It's expensive -- and destructive.

Companies often confuse talking with doing. They think that talking about doing something is the same thing as doing it! That planning is the same as doing. That giving presentations is the same as doing. That making reports is the same as doing. Or even that making a decision to do something is the same as doing it. All of those errors occur with alarming regularity in companies today.

Mistaking talk for action is worse than just a simple error: Talk can actually drive out action. Studies about the way that meetings actually work demonstrate that negative people are perceived as being smarter than positive people -- that is, being critical is interpreted as a sign of intelligence. You see this attitude in business all the time: The fastest way for me to seem smart is to cut you down. So you come up with an idea, and I come up with a thousand different reasons why that idea won't work. Now everyone sees you as dumb and me as smart -- and we've created an environment where no one wants to come up with ideas.

9. Decisions, by themselves, are empty.

The other trap that companies and people fall into is confusing making a decision with making something happen. First, we become obsessed with making the right decision -- which becomes a major obstacle to trying something to see if it works. Then we forget a simple fact: that a decision by itself changes nothing. A decision is the beginning of the process of doing, not the end of that process.

And so we work at making good decisions. Did we make the right decision? Did we have all of the information that we needed to make the decision? Is it possible that a better decision could have been made if better information had been produced? Well, it's always better to make a good decision than a bad decision -- but just making a decision doesn't change anything! Did you implement the decision? Did you actually do anything?

10. Oh no! Not another program!

One of the biggest enemies of getting something done is the dreaded "P" word: "program." Whenever you hear that a company is about to "roll out a program," it's not good news. It suggests that the company is about to spend all of its time worrying about the content of the program, rather than learning by doing. David Kelley, founder and CEO of Ideo Product Development, has it right: "Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects."

No matter how smart you are, you can't preplan everything and then roll out your program. What you want to do is to try some stuff and see what happens. And by the way, "enlightened trial and error" is the perfect antidote to the cynicism that exists in many organizations whose people have seen programs come and go. I recently visited a company whose CEO is famous for coming up with a new program every year. One year it's Six Sigma, the next it's Total Quality Management, the next it's customer satisfaction. Every year, that company's troops go through a bunch of plans and processes. And in the end, they've learned to do nothing at all.

11. Why do we do it that way? Um ...

Another huge obstacle to doing in companies is corporate memory: The memory of "how we've always done things around here" substitutes for "doing things the right way around here." The root, again, is fear. People don't want to make mistakes, and the best way to avoid making a mistake is to continue doing things exactly as they've always been done. Companies get trapped in a kind of circular logic: "We do what we do because it's the best thing to do. And it's the best thing to do because it's what we've always done."