Ready, Fire, Aim!

Photo courtesy of Thinkstock.

While there is currently a big focus in business on innovation, I have come to the conclusion that great businesses become great for two primary reasons: they make good decisions and ensure that those decisions are implemented. Unique ideas and concepts are important, but it is what you do with them that is going to make a travel agent or a company successful.

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Steve Jobs said of the extraordinarily innovative Apple: “I am more proud of what we said no to than what we said yes to.” In other words, it was the decisions that led to success, even when the decision was to walk away.

Implementation is just as important, but that can’t even come into play until the right decision is made. So for now let’s focus on the decision-making process. To use one of my sports analogies, decision-making is like the shooting sports found in the Olympics.

Many would argue that the best approach to making any decision is the classic three-step process for shooting at a target: “Ready, Aim, Fire!” And in many cases, this is indeed the best approach. In the business world, we may consider “Ready” as gathering all of the facts, “Aim” as analyzing those facts, and “Fire” as making the decision based on the conclusion of the first two steps.

In many cases this is the prudent and accepted way to move forward. Over the course of my career in travel, however, it has often been said of me that my process is more like “Ready, Fire, Aim.” At first I was upset that my impetuousness was questioned, and then I laughed it off, but now I will defend my decision-making process.

In the standard shooting sports, time does not play a significant factor. You can set up your shot, position your body and aim for as long as needed to make the shot. In contrast to my approach, this may be more like “Ready, Aim, Aim some more, Aim a bit more, Aim again, Make sure you are ready, Aim, Aim more carefully, Fire!” There are times and situations where this approach works, but in many cases that lengthy process will make the decision a bad one due to the time involved in making it.

For example, in the Winter Olympics the biathlon combines cross-country skiing and shooting. The winner must be fast and accurate. In other words, if too much time is spent aiming, even if the shots are perfect, the race will be lost.

Biatholon-Like Decisions
I think this sport and the process taken are more similar to the decisions you make as a small-business owner every day. Like it or not, we are all in a race, and your competitors are trying to win over the same customers you are trying to get. If your competitors can be faster without taking too much time on each shot (decision), they will win.

This analogy can go even one step further if we look at an example that may only loosely be called a sport—the old fashioned duel. Picture the two opponents back to back, pacing their 10 steps, turning to shoot and one of the duelists takes a few seconds to aim perfectly. Boom, he is dead.

In this case, aiming is a luxury that simply can’t be a part of the process. It seems that one would want to use the heavier emphasis on the process, which focuses on the aiming, for the bigger decisions. Yet as this example shows us, in a life-or-death decision, taking too much time to aim is deadly. Spending too much time analyzing is common and has created an environment known as “paralysis by analysis,” or, in other words, if you can’t move quickly you will be shot by your competitors.

So how do you know when to use “Ready, Aim, Fire” or the ridiculed “Ready, Fire, Aim”? There is no simple answer except to consider the competitive environment or the importance of time in taking the right approach to the decision. You also should consider the risk involved with the decision, because in some cases you can actually adjust your aim after the first shot and then shoot again.

On the other hand, there is an even more important lesson to learn from this when considering the two approaches. In both cases the similarity is in the first word “Ready,” which is where the true brilliance in decision-making comes. If you are indeed “Ready,” then you can either take your time to aim or, as they say, shoot from the hip.

Another word for “Ready” is practice. The duelists of old survived because they would practice shooting bottles or targets. They won because their practice made them “Ready.” And so it is in sales and in decision-making. Practice, study your industry, understand your competition and research options before the decisions even need to be made.

If your “aim” is to be great, then get “ready” now to make the right decisions to light your business on “fire”!