Think before you work

If you want your associates to roll their eyes, look at you as if you’ve lost your marbles or walk away shaking their heads, tell them that thinking is the best business tool ever made.

Like oil and water, Brady and Goodell, and culture and the Kardashians, thinking and business are usually at odds with each other. Taking action is the key to success in business, not sitting around thinking.

“I will act now,” Og Mandino, the venerated sales guru urged in his bestseller, “The Greatest Salesman in the World.” To make his point, he repeated, “I will act now” 18 times in one of his “scrolls.”

Hold on! In life and business “just doing it” can have disastrous consequences. How many times have you heard these words: “I didn’t think that would happen,” “I didn’t mean to,” or “Gee, I hadn’t thought of that.” If that’s not enough, “I’m sorry” are code words for “I didn’t think.”

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It’s the story of acting without thinking. Here’s how thinking changes things:

n Don’t ape the competition. All too often, competition is an 800-pound gorilla goading us into doing something counterproductive, useless or just plain stupid.

Google Compare is an example. An online auto insurance comparison-shopping service, it was touted as a disruptor and a “game changer,” but it was gone in only a year. Why? It didn’t understand that selling what customers need is quite different from selling what customers want.

n Doubt your customer-satisfaction scores. If a company measures its customer-satisfaction performance against that of its direct competitors, it’s a huge mistake. And here’s why. Direct competitors aren’t today’s competition. Think about it. Today’s customer-satisfaction competition is Amazon, Nordstrom, Apple, Trader Joe’s and others that get stellar ratings from their customers.

n Vet every idea before taking action. It may seem so obvious that it doesn’t deserve attention. But think about almost any meeting you’ve attended at work in the last week where a new, exciting idea was presented, gained momentum and was a done deal. Chances are no one spoke up and said, “Are we sure this will work?”

n Question canned answers. The air inside every business is polluted with pat answers, which are treated as if they’re factually true, even if they’re unsubstantiated.

This is nonsense because simplistic, pat answers squash creativity, inhibit learning and keep us from coming up with new ideas and ways of doing things. They cause us to act without thinking.

n Figure out what you’re known for. No one cares about what we do. What prospects, for example, try to figure out is quite different: “Why should we do business with you?” An insurance agent won a company’s business because he reviewed a company’s existing policies and found that critical coverages were missing, and others were inadequate. “He pays attention to the details,” his customer said. That’s what he’s known for. And it’s the details that make the difference.

What do your customers think about when they think about you? Could they tell you if you asked? More importantly, does everyone in your company understand what you’re known for, what makes you unique and valuable to customers? That takes thinking, not just doing.

Many of the problems businesses experience aren’t caused by a failure to act, but a failure to think. •

John Graham of GrahamComm is a marketing and sales-strategy consultant and business writer. Contact him at jgraham@grahamcomm.com.

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