Anti-Viral Treatment

The body corporate is just as vulnerable to infection as staff or their computers. John Batten prescribes some effective medicine for a particularly-insidious bug.
Endless procrastination, needless prevarication and decision-making paralysis are modern-day management scourges, now reaching epidemic proportions. For far too many marketing departments, the journey is more important than the destination – travelling but never actually arriving.
Unreasonably provocative? I don’t think so. We have all been infected to an extent – not in our bodies or PCs, but in our minds – by a powerful virus which I’ll call NOMAD – not making a decision. If any of the following phrases are at all familiar, then NOMAD is probably alive and prospering in your body corporate:
• Let’s go back on that before we can go forward.
• We need another round of meetings to involve all the stakeholders.
• Let’s find out (again) what our competitors are doing.
• Let’s double-check that thought with some more research.
• There might be a third way.
• Or a fourth way.
• We can’t proceed until we all agree.
Now, I’m not advocating a slapdash approach in which decisions are taken on an intuitive gut feeling – of course, they must be carefully considered. But I do contend that all companies must seek an effective treatment for the NOMAD virus.
First, though, it’s important to recognize some of its symptoms. Here are just a few.
Back to that journey I spoke about, the one towards a decision. The closer to the final committed decision, the slower and more tortuous the process becomes. It’s like reverse-polarity gravitation. Understandable to an extent, but often the quest to cover all options and to procrastinate means the moment is lost – and that the marketing dynamics have changed.
To read the full article, please download the PDF above.