In the book, Winning Decisions: Get it right the first time, Clay’s chapter covered ‘Learning from Experience.’ One comment he made that stood out was, “If you are not making any mistakes you are not working fast enough or taking enough risks.”
I did my first Squidoo Lens on Shepard Fairey. His motto is, ‘Do what you want first, and then ask for forgiveness.’ He was arrested several times for posting his artwork in public places around the world. He took a risk to go against his standard anti-government designs and created an image to support Barack Obama. He came up with the idea one day and the next he had the image posted on his website and posters all over Los Angeles. This image quickly spread to become the unofficial image of Obama’s Presidential campaign. As a result of his risk taking and fast turnaround, Fairey is now known as the, “most influential street and modern artist of all times.” (The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston).
Fairey is on the extreme side of working fast and taking risk. A more common business example of taking risk is working at a start-up company. Start-up’s are often very face-paced work environments with the attitude, ‘Get it done, get it done now, and get it done right.’ Working in such a fast paced environment can easily result in mistakes. Today, Allan shared with us an experience at a start-up company that overspent on branding. Looking back, they now see where they went wrong and learned from their mistakes. No one got hurt or died (well, maybe the company).
The SAMBA program is flying by and we are learning at a very fast pace. The lessons we learn from Winning Decisions, Thirteen Days and our Squidoo Lens about common decision making mistakes are very valuable. We need to slow down and spend the time on these concepts now in order to maximize our time and lessen our mistakes in the future. In the words of my JBoss colleagues, “git ‘er done”
I used "git 'er dun!" just this past week!
:-)
Posted by: Shaun Connolly | 02/07/2009 at 02:21 PM