You can be highly intelligent, motivated and hard working, but if you keep making poor decisions then you simply won’t be successful.
A lot of entrepreneurs and CEOs know this, of course, and so they sometimes make an even bigger mistake.
They avoid making major decisions at all.
They procrastinate, prevaricate and generally avoid saying Yes or No to the really tough choices.
Be honest, are you sometimes a bit slow in making big decisions?
Then you may find Jeff Bezos’s decision making system very useful.
Jeff of course, is the founder of Amazon and clearly one of the greatest CEOs in modern history. But few people know he has a special method of making decisions.
Bezos categorizes important decisions, into Type 1 and Type 2.
Type 1 decisions are those that are highly important, and can’t be reversed, at least not easily. Type 2 decisions are those that are relatively simple to reverse, if they prove to be wrong.
At Amazon, everyone puts huge thought into Type 1 decisions, researching carefully, deliberating in depth and triple checking every element.
But with Type 2 decisions Bezos insists that his team make decisions quickly, and just get on with it. After all, if they prove to be incorrect they can quickly be shut down and an alternative tactic tried.
Jeff Bezos believes categorizing decisions in this way has played a vital role in making Amazon such an effective company and avoiding becoming a lumbering bureaucracy as it grew.
What about you? Do you see some value in this technique?
Why not try it for the next month and see if it improves the quality of the decisions you make, and the speed by which you make them.
In the end, the success of your company depends on how well you and your team make decisions. If you want to get better at it, using the decision making technique of one of the word’s greatest entrepreneurs is a great place to start.
