Be Decisive...

I can't tell you how much it annoys me when people can't be decisive. I think it probably rubs us all the wrong way.

Be the decisive one, if people don't like your idea, force them to give you a better idea. When you challenge people, they respect you more, you can do this with out being seen as being pushy, or over dominating. For example:

John and Molly are trying to decide where to eat, Molly asks John what he wants for dinner and he says it doesn't matter to him that it was up to her, Molly can't make up her mind either. Both are stuck in a cyclical conversation of indecisiveness until they both decide not to go out to eat and starve to death.

This particular conversation is a minimal example of how indecisiveness can be dangerous, this is how that conversation should have gone. Molly will be the decisive alpha in the conversation.

John and Molly are trying to decide where to eat. Molly asks John what he feels like for dinner, and he replies that it does not matter to him (this is a lie). Molly suggests that she would like to go to a japanese steak house and get sushi.

Again, a simplistic example. However, being indecisive in business situations can be detrimental to a business. In a lot of cases executives and business owners get stuck in "over analyzing" a situation. Time to market can be extremely important. When I launch a product, I launch that product with all of the advertising options I can, however, I test each advertising option against the other (split testing, and A/B testing). After as little as 24 hours I can begin to see what is working and what isn't working, normally I begin to take out what isn't working in as little as 48 hours (sometimes a little sooner). As I take things out (ad placements, keywords, ad wording) I add new stuff in to test.

The key is I was decisive about launching my product, I did allow a bunch of analytics tell me how I should launch my product. I allowed live analytics coming in to show me in real time what does and does not work. It will change from product to product, and from medium to medium.

When I was working for a Top 50 IT firm, I saw management indecisiveness cost them lots of money. Don't let this happen to you, be the decisive one, people will respect you more, and you will make more money by doing so, you can't learn, if you don't make mistakes.

To quote Carrie Wilkerson from The Barefoot Executive - Are you making excuses or being motivated by REASONS? (continue reading &aquo;)