Think About It?

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If you’ve been following along in this space you’ll know that we spent a little time in Hardware Hell the last week or so. Motherboards frying, backup drives breathing their last, laptop displays going dark like a theater marquee after a string of bad reviews.
As I was doing my best to repair this stuff and not electrocute myself by weeping into a live circuit, The Mrs. asked “how do you know all this stuff?” In my mind, it wasn’t so much how I knew it but how I was able to dive in and get to work without spending a lot of time thinking about it. The business thought?
If you drive a car, try this the next time you get behind the wheel. Say everything you’re doing out loud. You’ll be amazed at all the things you’re doing without thinking. It wasn’t that way when you started with your learner’s permit.  You probably had to tell yourself everything (or listen to whomever was teaching you to drive do so).  Or if you play a sport, try to play while you tell yourself what you should be doing. You can’t. Even we golfers with a hundred voices in our heads will stop the chatter (most of the time) when the swing starts.  We’ve done our talking on the range.  In this recent book on Mickey Mantle he was asked about hitting by other ballplayers and, unlike Ted Williams who could describe the art down to the millisecond, Mantle usually just said “I dunno – I just hit it.”  He had natural ability – most of us need to research, learn, and internalize.

I think that’s the place we want to be in business and certainly in management.  We shouldn’t have to talk ourselves through handling a crisis or a personnel issue.  We should have put in the hours of practice before we get to the plate or behind the wheel.  It should all be instinctive.  I think that’s where the breakdown occurs for a lot of less-competent managers.  They haven’t gone to the figurative business driving range enough so they can perform at a high level without thinking – read books, go to seminars, you know the drill.  Or worse – they’ve internalize bad habits which they mindlessly put on display.

What are you thinking?  Or are you?