Howdy. Thinking back to my nursing, I’ve been trying to come up with the biggest business lesson I’ve learnt. It was easy.
2 things I did later in my career were run the Resuscitation Program – part of that role was to head up the resus team and manage any resuscitations. The other was one of my last positions at the last hospital I worked at – and that role was running the hospital after hours.
Once 5 pm came around, I was in charge of everything till the end of the shift at 11 pm. All medical staff, all admin staff, all the buildings, everything.
And the lesson I learnt from those 2 was this:
If there is a problem to address, gather the information you need and make the decision NOW.
Particularly in emergency situations people tend to get a little tense and don’t always make decisions. The important thing was to take action and take action now.
Unlike resuscitations, in business it ain’t life or death if you make the wrong decision. But it’s still important to make a decision.
If it is the wrong decision, then try something else. If that doesn’t work then try something else. Take action, because action leads to different consequences.
Cheers
Great post.
I learned – “Make the decision NOW! Take action!”
In the book “SalesDogs” the author also talks about just taking action, just do something.
Thanks,
Mike
Thanks Mike
Action is everything. Things happen when you take action. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
In Resus people would often freeze at the stress of it all – my words of advice were “Don’t worry. Just try something because you can’t possibly make this situation any worse.”
Put like that it makes sense to take action.
I guess in business you can make things worse, but at least you have that expoerience of knowing what doesn’t work (I think it was Edison who said he didn’t look upon each of his light bulb experiments not working as a failure, but a success in that he’d found another way the light bulb didn’t work and was therefore another step closer to finding the way it would work).
Thanks again Mike.
Brendon
There is a great book that I just got sent to review about quick decisions called “Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”.
It was a fascinating read that I would recommended to anyone who has to make snap decisions.
Anthony Robbins says the same, take action!
Or you can listen to Nike, “Just Do It!”
Anyway, I agree. What do you have to lose?
I can think of only two situations where it’s best not to take action.
1) when you’re being attacked by a grizzly bear
2) when you’re lying on the floor during a bank robbery.
I think that about covers the situations where “playing dead” is the best thing to do.
Anyway, good post.