Do Deals, Not Therapy: Action Beats Analysis in Business

Beware too much navel-gazing, especially when business is slow. Business is at its best when people are busy.

In 1997, the late John Caldon – the brilliant, former Deputy MD of Macquarie – told me that an Executive Director in the Corporate Finance division had just returned from an MBA at Harvard and had commenced one-on-one interviews with all senior executives in the division. The interviews were aimed at identifying frustrations and bottlenecks.

“Sounds good”, I commented glibly.

“Mmm, I’m not so sure Adam. If you ask people if they’re happy, almost everyone will tell you that they’re not.

Everyone is a little unhappy about something. Interviews like this are an invitation to dwell on the negative, and worse, they generate an expectation that all the contradictory grievances will somehow be magically addressed.”

I must have looked a little bemused, so John continued: “If people are feeling a bit frustrated, Adam, it’s because they’re not doing enough deals. The best antidote for that is not interviews, it’s doing deals.”

Business is an arena for action, not a psychoanalytic talk-fest. Nothing succeeds like success.