--- Jan Coffey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Is it not better to do a few thing right thn many > things wrong? > Jan
I don't think so, actually. One of the things that I think I've learned the last two years (I've written about this on my blog at greater length) is that the basic decisions to be made are not, generally, all that hard. Sometimes they are - and that's when it's the most fun. But usually they aren't. It's just that the people involved with making them are too busy to actually take the time to go over the issues and make the decision. The usual thing in business I've noticed, and in government by anecdote, is that people are usually putting out fires continually, without the time to make longer-term strategic decisions. Consulting companies are often hired, I think, in order to bring this sort of extra capacity to the table, not for any particular brilliance of their employees (any of you who felt that consultants were particularly brilliant have, of course, been disabused of that notion over the past couple of years...). It is possible to be quite productive at hour 100 of a week. It takes time and acclimatization, and not everyone can do it (there are people at McK - often very successful ones - who simply refuse to work on studies of that intensity), but it is certainly possible. And people who can do it are, over a span of time, more productive than people who cannot. If you have (for example) one month to present an opinion on some issue to the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company, then you had better be really thorough in what you present. Surely one large (but often overlooked) component of, say, the astonishing output of Winston Churchill and Napoleon (to pick very different figures) is that both are said to have routinely slept four hours a night. That's extra time to work that adds up pretty quickly. I would be willing to give up quite a lot if I could get by on four hours of sleep without feeling constantly tired, as they were able to do. It is also often quite necessary. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
