Problems Solve Selves, Up To A Point

George Bush once boasted about “a thousand points of light.” He could have been referring to our readers.

Without fail, they seem to be able to offer a myriad of different, useful points of view concerning the topics covered in this column.

After our piece about the importance of speed in the business world today, one reader called to express his success with just the opposite approach.

“I found that letting problems ‘ripen’ for a while helps me decide which ones are important enough to get my full attention. Some simply go away. If I reacted immediately to every issue that landed on my desk, I’d be lunging in a million different directions and getting nothing done in the process.”

This is a wise observation and not inconsistent with our sermon about speed. Napoleon used to open his mail just once a month, claiming that, by then, most of the issues had resolved themselves, and he could then spend adequate time tackling the more critical, intractable ones.

While this approach allows for a concentrated use of time and energy, it also leaves a lot to chance. And nowhere is it written that a potentially business-breaking problem must languish benignly until you get around to treating it. By the time you finally do something, it might very well be too late.

This is not to say, however, that every problem is created equal. The Pareto Principle tells us that 20 percent of the problems usually cause 80 percent of the ill-effects.

The trick is finding which of the challenges confronting you are among the one-fifth that can wreak the greatest havoc. Here’s where your “triage” talents can pay off. You have to decide which of the problems are the most threatening and worthy of your immediate attention.

This is an essential skill for managers as well as emergency room physicians. Both experience and intuition are needed to perform a meaningful diagnosis. Once the priorities have been sorted, speed is of the essence.

You’ll probably find that during the course of your selective treatment of the mega-menaces, the more minor issues have resolved themselves or someone else has stepped in and fixed them for you.

Also, you should be on guard against “accepting” problems not worthy of your time and attention in the first place.

In his hilariously insightful book “The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey,” Ken Blanchard finds that most of the problems encountered by managers are brought to them by other people who are unjustifiably trying to unburden themselves. They carry these difficulties on their backs like monkeys, just waiting to transfer a monkey, and the responsibility for its care and feeding, to someone else.

So the next time someone stops by your office, be mindful of the fact they are probably carrying at least one monkey that they’re going to attempt to leave with you when they depart. Your job as a manager is to make sure that people care for their own monkeys and that some of yours are properly “delegated” to them.

Blanchard suggests that in large companies an inability to hand-off monkeys to one’s subordinates is the reason that many managers are typically running out of time while their staffs are running out of work. He wisely concludes: “Things not worth doing are not worth doing well.”

A reader called with a warning about using e-mail for marketing. If you are going to use cyberspace to hawk your wares make sure, he warns, that your target consumers are open to such an approach.

Unsolicited e-mail can be trashed with the speed of light, but the ill-will created by them can linger for a long time.

Any effort to sell yourself or your product through on-line chat rooms is anathema. If you try, you’ll be “flamed,” a process whereby the affronted users of this service will jam your mailbox with retaliatory messages to the extent that you are virtually denied electronic access to the rest of the world. So when establishing new customer contacts, be sure you secure those clients’ approvals to use their e-mail for marketing to them.

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