Tom Peters - Too Much Talk, Too Little Do

Apply the experience of excellent companies to your own career

I love the work of Tom Peters whose star rose when he penned In Search of Excellence and has continued to shine ever since. His web site is full of all sorts of great inspiration and insight. To that end I feel somewhat pleased that I bumped into some of his writing that seems in line with my post the other day about how to be more productive than the next person by picking one important thing and just getting it done.

As I was lookng around Tom’s site I noticed his key phrase - “Too Much Talk, Too Little Do” or as he put it in his 8 basics of excellent performance - “A Bias for Action.”

“at ‘excellent’ companies there was lot less emphasis on strategy - but there was a persistent focus on ’simply doing stuff’”

Too many people and too many organizations spend far too much time thinking, planning, talking and too little actually doing. You may not realize it happening at work, but I’ll bet you do when the government spends all your tax dollars talking. How do you feel when they call yet another Congressional Inquiry, investigation, or Royal Commission into something that we all know they should just DO. In the corporate world, while you are planning your next brilliant move, your competitors are out doing, outmaneuvering you. There’s no point having that brilliant strategy if the market has passed you by.

Peters states that when he was researching his now-famous book he found that at “excellent” companies there was lot less emphasis on strategy - but there was a persistent focus on “simply doing stuff” rather than talking it to death. Or put another way I first heard in the Education world from Richard DuFour , be a “ready, Fire, Aim” kind of person - not the more typical “Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim…”

Whether we are talking about the strategy of your company, or just your own work inside a company, it’s better to get on with it and risk making a few mistakes than never to be called to action at all. Do you pour over sales reports planning the perfect strategy for days (weeks?), when the next person might just pick up the phone and call his best customer to talk. How many customers could you meet with, show some special attention and learn their needs, while you were looking at those reports and planning strategy?

This reminds yet again of the 80/20 rule whereby 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients - usually more than 80%. You know who the 20% are. Get on with working better with them and identifying who else meets their profile so that you can find the next member of that group. Don’t waste time planning the perfect way to leverage the bottom 80%.

In the office you can bet 80+% of the value you have to your firm, 80+% of the opportunity you have to impress your superiors comes from less than 20% of the work. Get on with it! Let the other 80% take care of itself. Allow yourself to drop a few of those balls - they don’t matter in the big picture - and get on with maximizing your returns.

Quick - what’s the most important thing that you could do for your company right now. Go Do It!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!