By Jack Cumming

Anyone in a leadership position knows that direct reports and others regularly come to you with ideas. They want your approval or, perhaps, they want your permission. If you give the go-ahead, then the responsibility for success or failure passes to you. If you demur, the idea likely dies aborning. It takes pragmatic courage to stay current with innovation.

Ideas Are Easy

How you respond in those spontaneous moments tells a lot about who you are and what your leadership can achieve. The truth, though, is that ideas are easy. Bringing them to reality and reaping the rewards are the hard parts.

I thought of this minor truth recently when reading Jamie Siminoff’s book, “DingDong”. If you’ve forgotten, Jamie Siminoff invented the Ring Doorbell. He went on Shark Tank without success, but he later sold his business to Amazon for over $1 billion. Who needs Shark Tank when Amazon comes knocking? Or should we say, when Amazon rings your bell and appears on your Ring feed?

Christmas Crisis

Siminoff writes of a crisis he faced on the penultimate day before Christmas 2013. He was brainstorming in a restaurant with associates. He writes that, despite the urgent crisis he faced,

“The waitstaff seemed in a good mood. Why not? December 23rd may be even more fun than Christmas Eve and Christmas itself, because it’s 100% anticipation, not yet the actual execution of the holiday.”

That’s like the joy of youth when all possibilities still stand open before you. It’s different in old age when the responsibility for the choices of your life is behind you. Time and mortality are real.

Decision Wisdom

A wise friend once shared with me a truth about decision-making. He was talking of a local clergyman’s inability to act decisively, even though the clergyman was intelligent and a very good listener and learner.

“Some people feel most comfortable making a decision quickly and then redirecting the outcome to make things work out for the best,” he said, “while others revel in the anticipation when all potential outcomes still seem possible.”

The result he explained is that some leaders love the process of analysis and contemplation but hate the eliminating of possibilities that a decision entails. They tend to spend endless hours in meetings and studies without reaching decisions. Others quickly consider the choices, focus on the one that makes the most sense, and decide, knowing that they can usually shift direction afterwards if needed. They are people of action.

Decision paralysis is not limited to business. For many, many years, I knew I had no marriage and that my wife thought it was the man’s role to do the ending. Still, I would have worked it out and that hope, that one day my then-wife would realize that I was a keeper, kept me from acting. Well, that was part of it. I also didn’t want to lose my children. We lived in New York, and my then-wife dreamed of Hawaii. It’s a long, complicated story. We weren’t matched. It took twenty years of misery before we separated.

Thinkers and Doers

This dynamic between the lure of action and that of deliberation has been a major interest of mine from early in my career. While I was working my way up through the corporate bureaucracy of a major New York City life insurance company, I also secretly pursued graduate studies in history in night school at NYU.

My aim was to understand the human dynamic in business. Actuarial studies provided the scientifically analytical approach, what we now call “data directed.” Things are what they are because that’s what the numbers show they must be. History studies provided the human dynamic. Things are what they are because that was the direction set by those who made the early decisions.

To clarify, we can apply this to the senior living industry. The data and actuarial reasoning show that old age is inevitable. Moreover, old age is accompanied by loss of capacity and increasing dependence. That creates an opportunity for people to help others, which is the basis for any business. Without a customer, there can be no business.

That brings us into the human side, for which history is, perhaps, the best path toward understanding. The industry is largely tax-exempt because clergy played a major role in its infancy, and they are accustomed to tax exemption and hope that the practical side of things would work out for the best. As it turns out, not-for-profit organization and tax exemption allow management freedom of action and less accountability than is available in the general world of human endeavor. This has a lot to do with the senior living industry’s decision dynamic.

Historical Precedents

My history interest led me to focus on the lives of interesting historical figures who can help anyone to be a more effective leader. John Law was a thinker and doer whose thinking got ahead of the practical, leading to the debacle of the Mississippi Company. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was a diplomat so skilled in the art of human persuasion that he won France a seat at the table when the victors in the Napoleonic Wars decided what to do with the French losing nation.

Walther Rathenau was a dilettante philosopher who published widely on social issues even as he built the German General Electric Company. He went on to help Germany overcome its raw materials shortages during World War I and, later as a diplomat, to negotiate the Rapallo Treaty, allowing defeated Germany to begin to rearm after its WWI defeat.

These thinkers who were also doers are fascinating people to get to know. They are also rare, and there are precious few in any generation, but they have the potential to change the world for the better in their time.

Learning From Others

Takeaway: It’s better to act and regret it than to endlessly dillydally with little to show for it. When someone comes to you with an idea, ponder quickly — on the spot — whether the idea has merit. If it does, just say, “Go for it!” Don’t take it under advisement. That’s stultifying. Don’t immediately find all the flaws in the subordinate’s idea. That’s just letting fear be your guide.

You may have read of Jeff Bezos’s innovation at Amazon, where people with ideas were encouraged to submit short (6-page max) elaborations of the merits of their idea for senior management consideration. That simple “Go for it!” concept took Amazon in unexpected directions and helped make it the behemoth it is today. Learning from others is always preferable to the alternative of learning from hubris.

Rule #1: Let the thinker act on the idea. If it fails, the practical thinker should be the first to see it. If it succeeds, it might upend the industry. It’s better to be a motivator than a discourager. Rule #2: If the thinker-doer, who might be you, is not obsessive about leading and about learning by critiquing your own best thoughts, you’d best stick to administration. Your remuneration can still be outsized, but the business you oversee likely won’t be an industry leader.

Beyond Copycat Convention

As Jamie Siminoff put it, after persuading a venture capital firm to let him “Go for it!” with his doorbell innovation:

“Conventional-thinking non-weirdos make bad venture capitalists, generally, and do well only when the tides rise so fast that everyone makes it, despite themselves.”

Are you an everyone or a leader?