New-school thinking: three old-school principles—ego, speed, and solutions—are hurting organizations and must be expelled

T+D, Oct, 2003 by Steve Smith, Dave Marcum

In the current business climate, success is down. It's time for a reality check, and recognizing old-school thinking is key.

There are habits, or addictions, many businesspeople have that get in the way of new thinking for improving results. Those addictions are standard operating procedures in many companies, but they don't have to be.

Businesspeople often fail because they spend a lot of time protecting or hiding their weaknesses through their egos. They lose sight of opportunities to improve of recognize better ideas when they're offered. Humility is the antidote. People need collaboration, which doesn't happen except when working hard to overcome ego issues.

Because of pressure, decisions are rushed and pushed through without much thinking, which typically leads to the first option being taken instead of the best option. The authors advise slowing down, thinking through the issues, and asking whether the need for speed is real and justified. Don't let enthusiasm interfere with good decision making.

Finally, it's imperative to discern between a real solution and an event. What hurts businesses, often fatally, is focusing more on the things they could be doing and not enough on the things they should be doing.

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Before you can engage in new-school thinking, you have to recognize old-school thinking. Three old-school business addictions are ego, speed, and solutions. They're popular, but dangerous. If business were a class and the professor handed out grades right now, few would be on the Dean's List. Many would be failing. "But wait a minute," you say, "how could we be getting an F? It can't be all that bad. How are companies surviving if we're all failing?"

We don't fail all of the time--just most of the time. The pain, and even awareness, of the failure is often swallowed up in anticipation of our next success which, according to the numbers, isn't likely. Businesses fail, new products crash and burn, training and performance initiatives get sideswiped, projects are abandoned, and we often chalk up the failure to the status-quo cost of doing business. What drives the failure? Here are some of the lowlights.

What businesspeople do

More than one-third of all business decisions are driven by ego. According to a businessThink * business think.biz survey conducted by Paul Nutt at Ohio State, 81 percent of managers push their decisions through by edict or persuasion, not by the power or relevance of their ideas. Only 7 percent of businesspeople consider long-term priorities or confer with colleagues when making decisions. Eighty-seven percent of people are confident in themselves, but only 27 percent are confident in others with whom they work. We trust us; we just don't trust them.

What companies get

Fifty-percent of all decisions inside companies fail. Almost 95 percent of all new products rail. Sixty-five percent of strategic acquisitions and mergers have been abysmal failures, resulting in negative shareholder value and market share, according to the Synergy Trap. Sixty-percent of all new businesses fail within the first six years of operation, reports the Small Business Administration. Globally, 82 percent of companies go under by their 10th anniversary, says Dun & Bradstreet.

Compounding the problem, 91 percent of businesspeople say they're as confident as ever in their ability to make the right business decisions, yet the success of their decisions hasn't improved for decades. The scary (and sad) thing about all of the failures is that we're not learning from them, which is probably the biggest failure. Confidence is up, success is down. We need a reality check. The good news is that a lot of the failure is unnecessary. There are habits, if not addictions, we all have in business that get in the way of new thinking that improves results. These habits are the power we wield (of perceived lack thereof), our lack of curiosity in the name of playing it safe, ego, politics, being defensive, crowding out others by our arrogance, speed for the sake of speed, being busy--the list could go on for way too long. Many of those addictions have embedded themselves as standard operating procedures in companies--and in our thinking--for decades and often feel like the only tools we have left to deal with the dysfunction. Not true.

When we did our research for writing and developing our book, businessThink, we were in search of the driving force behind failures. We didn't find just one, but we did find one certainty: Failure starts with our thinking. We didn't study organizations, we studied people--individual human beings all over the world and their thinking, communication, and collaboration (or lack of) in meetings, team projects, and one-on-one conversations. A set of rules developed that separated the ordinary workers from the extraordinary businesspeople. What keeps people in their old-school paradigms and limited by functional ceilings are three common and dangerous addictions.

Addiction 1: Ego

If you think ego and politics hurt government, you should see what it does to your company. The best ideas often don't win in an organization because people don't leave their egos checked at the door when they walk into a meeting. Even great ideas often get watered down and compromised for the sake of preserving someone's ego, often the boss's. The result is that bad ideas win, or the real issues that desperately need candid discussion don't get put on the table or aren't explored honestly and openly. As people work together, signs arise that great ideas and new insights are being sacrificed at the expense of ego: