Musings at Altitude

Business can be a brutal battlefield – business lives are saved or lost by the decisions made by the business battlefield leaders.  And business battlefield leaders today are inundated with sensory data that drives decisions and actions…or sometimes indecisiveness and inaction. 

 

[Photo from www.army.mil]

I’ve both led in business battles and witnessed other leaders in business battles, and I’m convinced that action trumps inaction, and on the magnitude of sin scale, sins of omission create so many more business casualties than sins of commission.

In the coming days, I’ll be writing more about “omission”.  Omission comes in many forms but primarily from a failure to act.  When your gut tells you that something is wrong, it probably is.  When the sensory data that is being collected from your business is incredibly bad or incredibly good, that’s a clear sign that questions need to be asked and urgent action needs to be taken.  When the results dramatically vary from the trends, unless something phenomenal has been done to dramatically affect the results then all kinds of warning notices need to be launched and intense probing needs to occur.

Unfortunately, casualties in business that result from sins of omission are burned into your memory for a lifetime…you never forget and you are constantly haunted by those warning signs that went off and the inaction that then occurred.