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April 24, 2014 at 05:50 AM
There’s a famous story about Ulysses Grant, when he was in command of the Union’s main army in the western theater of the Civil War. At a time when the outcome of the war was still very much in question, Grant devised a plan that involved moving some 80,000 soldiers hundreds of miles. He was talking to a general in charge of the army’s railroads about making the move happen, who asked him: “General Grant, you’re talking about a massive undertaking, involving men, horses, and thousands of tons of supplies. Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” Grant replied: “No, of course I’m not sure. But in war, the worst thing you can do is nothing. If it turns out this is wrong thing, then we’ll do something else.”
Now I’m not saying that running an advisory firm is like war, but there do seem to be some similarities—and decision-making appears to be one of them. As you might imagine, there’s a mind-boggling amount of literature written each year about business management. Yet, as far as I can tell, most experts these days agree that decision-making by its leaders is the most important factor in the success of any business. In our work, we find that decision-making is so important to the success of advisory firms that we spend much of our time—directly or indirectly—teaching owner-advisors to make better business decisions. Often, it’s an uphill battle.
Part of the problem is that rather than trying to determine what is really holding back their firm—including their decision-making—most owner-advisors want to believe that just hiring the right person/people will solve all their problems. This seems to be a very human tendency: if we have a problem, we look around for someone to help us solve it. Unfortunately, when a business is dysfunctional, hiring more people will only make it worse (unless, I suppose, it’s a new CEO, which most advisory firms can’t afford).
I was explaining this fact to a group of advisors in a workshop a few months ago, when one of them piped up: “I wish we could just find someone like you who could come into our business and make an impact from day one.”
I responded by saying “I can’t make an impact on any business from day one.” They started arguing with me: “But it’s your expertise. How long will it take you?” “Six months,” I said. “Why would it take you six months?” they asked. Me: “It will take that long to learn how you make decisions. Then I can have a big impact.”
Over the years, I’ve realized that different firm owners have different “decision-making” personalities. They tend to fall into three groups:
1) Owners who make decisions very quickly, but after they’ve had time to think about it, they change their minds, not to a different course of action, just to not doing what we had decided. I had one client like this whose action I could nearly predict. I could count on getting an email 36 hours after we had made a decision, taking it back. Owners who have a hard time committing to a course of action greatly limit their firms’ growth, and demoralize their employees with all the starting and stopping.
