Betty Liu* says that in the corporate world failure to make a crucial decision is a decision in itself — and possibly the worst one you could make.
We’ve all been there: Stuck making a decision.
Your mind spins like a hamster wheel over which choice is the right one.
Not only is this mentally exhausting (poor hamsters) but it’s a time-drain.
If you are in business, indecision can be costly — stalling a decision could cost you clients.
So what’s the issue, why do we find it so hard to push ahead and nail our colours to the mast?
Someone said to me recently that the hardest decision someone makes is the first decision.
So true, we often stall so as to avoid a decision, but once we make it, the momentum follows.
Whenever you’re at a crossroads, just remember that indecision is a decision.
Making a choice is better than not making one at all.
If you made the wrong choice, you can always course correct.
Now don’t for one minute think I am advocating rash decision-making.
Nobody should jump into decisions without weighing up the cause and effect of one decision over another.
It’s simply that after a while, spending too long mulling it over is a decision in itself.
What I try and do is: Weigh everything up, think it over and then act.
Don’t paralyse yourself with indecision.
Though some decisions can be frightening to make, what’s scarier still is not choosing because you are frightened of making the wrong choice.
I’m not alone with this approach; these chief executives I have interviewed have a thing or two to say on the matter.
Founder and Chief Executive of Chobani, Hamdi Ulukaya advises making a decision and if it fails moving on to the next one.
“The worst part is, you wait too long to make a mistake, and then you will wait too long to overcome the mistake,” Mr Ulukaya said.
“We all make mistakes; that’s part of life. If you don’t, you’re not living.”
Chief Executive of Delta Air Lines, Ed Bastian said he forces decision-making.
“I think inertia is a disease within corporations,” Mr Bastian said.
“It can grow quickly and it can slow down… organisations need to move at the pace of the market, not the pace of their internal bureaucracies.”
Chief Executive of UPS, David Abney said everyone has a choice.
“You either make a decision and you go with that based on the facts that you have at hand, or you don’t make a decision, which means you’ve just decided to leave things as they are,” Mr Abney said.
“Sometimes that decision is the worst decision you can make.”
*Betty Liu is an anchor person for Bloomberg Television and founder of Radiate Inc., a media technology platform that unlocks knowledge from the world’s most successful people. She can be contacted at radiateinc.com.
This article first appeared on the Radiate Inc. website.
