When do you want it? “As soon as possible”, comes the ready answer.
Everyone says it. Everyone knows what they mean by it, in essence, and it seems fairly harmless. But more often than not, I’ve seen it overused as a substitute for real thought and real leadership.
Especially in this new era of “internet time”, the declaration of “I want it ASAP” has often turned into an excuse not to plan, a rejection of due diligence and careful preparation, or even an intentional ignoring of previous lessons learned. Taken to an extreme, it can represent the triumph of pure testosterone over diligence and caution.
Meg Whitman, former CEO at eBay, writes in her recent book, The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life about how one positive performance differentiator of individuals at eBay was their sense of urgency. “eBay never would have prospered as it did without a team with a strong bias for action,” she states. Having worked in a couple of places that were unnecessarily and infuriatingly slow in their decision-making, I too tend to generally applaud a bias towards action in business. It reflects a philosophy that an imperfect plan executed right now is usually better than a perfect plan executed next year. Or, as Seth Godin puts it in his book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable: “Real artists ship.” Or, as a tweet I saw recently had it, “if you’re not embarrassed by the first launch of your product, that means you waited too long.”
However, one can take a bias towards action too far.
