Change Agent - Issue 47

Of course, even if you're not at work, you stay in touch. You use your PDA to check your email in a taxi. You make sure that your cell phone has a headset so you can talk while you're driving the family to the Grand Canyon for vacation.

For a while, it seemed as if all of this made sense. It seemed as if working longer hours made your company move faster and that moving faster made your company win.

Well, now that the NASDAQ has cooled off and we've seen that maybe, just maybe, the new economy is not a speed-to-market, first-mover advantage, IPO, winner-take-all world, it's time to reevaluate this work-ethic mind-set. But ironically, instead of getting us to challenge the myth of the grindstone, the NASDAQ hiccup has a lot of people too scared to act smart.

What's smart? The fact is, the companies that made good decisions a year ago or even five years ago are thriving today. Their stock may be down, but the companies are still on course.

Alas, among those that failed to make the right decisions, the strategy is apparently not to step back and start making the best decisions. Instead, the approach seems to be to work even harder, ignoring the fact that companies may be working hard on the wrong things!

Some folks think their boss, their boss's boss, or Wall Street wants to hear, "Well, we'll just keep our heads down and work even harder." Wrong! I think what's missing is people saying, "We learned from that mistake. Here are the smart decisions that are going to take us where we want to go now."

There's a huge difference between working in a mine or a factory and doing what you do for a living. In the old days, people made stuff. You don't make stuff. You make decisions.

And the thing about making decisions is that you don't make better decisions when you work longer hours. You don't write better code when you work longer hours. You don't create better business-development deals, make better sales pitches, or invent cooler interfaces when you work longer hours either.

Let's face it: The marathon culture of "I work harder than you do" is nothing but an excuse to avoid making the hard decisions.

Think about the last time you faced a deadline at work. Odds are, you made the deadline -- but just barely. Now imagine that the deadline had been one day further away. You still would have made the deadline. Your work would have been just as good. And the words "just barely" would still be associated with the project.

It's an old saw, but it's still true in the new economy: Work expands to fill the time allotted for it.

If you allot 12 hours to work every day, you'll spend 12 hours. But are you going to make more decisions? Better decisions?

Let's do a little history exercise. Imagine five success stories of the past decade. Think of companies such as Cisco, Palm, Yahoo!, Starbucks, and JetBlue.

Now list the six decisions that each company made that turned it into a success. Are there six things that each one decided to do that transformed it from an ordinary company into an extraordinary success? There might even be fewer than six things.

Everything else these companies did around those decisions is just commentary. Yes, there were important operations happening to make those decisions valid. But those operations weren't the key to those companies' successes. As strategist Gary Hamel says, in the future, business-model innovation will be a key success factor.

And it's not just fancy corporate-strategy stuff. Great programmers know that 80% of software project's success or failure is determined by the decisions made during the first four weeks of systems architecture. Get that part right, and you won't be fighting an uphill battle for the rest of the project.

Talk to any truly successful lawyer -- the kind with great clients, a great reputation, and plenty of cash. You'll find that the secret of her success isn't pulling an all-nighter the night before a client meeting or a big trial. The secret is understanding the key issues and making decisions about how to act on them. Nobody ever hired a law firm because he was impressed with how well stapled the memos were.

Now think about your company. Are people so busy implementing, defending, building, and pulling all-nighters that they are shortchanging the time that they ought to be spending making decisions?

Take a look at the future. When you write your company's history two years from now, which decisions will have really mattered? What were the key moments that led you to create such a success?

Write them down. Post them on the wall. And work on them!

That's what you should spend your time on. Getting those decisions right is far more important than answering your 103rd email message or hacking that last piece of code.