Effective executives avoid false choices, decisions 
where only limited, and variously unattractive, alternatives are considered.
Instead, when confronted with a false choice, the best executives reframe decisions into empowering, real choices like in the examples below:
False Choice Example #1: Data - based versus “Gut” - based decision making.
New school “Moneyball” executives say opinions and experience just don’t matter - that there is always more truth and wisdom in the numbers than in executive “intuition.”
“Old School” executives pooh-pooh this stuff and instead channel Henry Ford who famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
The Real Choice: Data informs, but does not determine, key business decisions.
Time and effort is taken to collect and analyze key business data and metrics, but executives also draw upon their educations, their life and professional experiences, and the counsel of trusted advisors for the full and nuanced view.
And then, from a place of leadership and authority, decide.
False Choice Example #2: A flexible and virtual work culture or a “cheeks in seats” high accountability one.
Most modern professionals, especially younger ones, value and crave mobility and schedule flexibility.
The best companies desire access to global talent, especially from lower cost geographies and on flexible, pay as you go terms.
Yet with too much of a workforce too often toiling in their pajamas from their home offices, can the energy and day-to-day nitty-gritty management necessary for high accountability and performance be sustained?
Yes and no. Yes, it is far easier to manage and motivate human beings the way it has been done since time immemorial, through ongoing, in-person interaction but....
...this high value must be weighed against the unique costs and sometimes competitive disadvantages of doing so - the costs of office space, of commuting time and energy, and of geographically limiting access to talent, etc.
The Real Choice: Instead of evaluating the choice through the typical in-person versus virtual divide, instead let’s do so through the prism of great management by crystal-clear objectives versus the fuzzier, “attaboy” approach. This means quantitatively and explicitly defining:
- Project/process goals;
- The precise as possible time required by each worker to accomplish those goals;
- Over time defining better, higher ROI goals and then defining the training / additional learnings to reduce the time and energy needed to accomplish them; and,
- Providing that training / learning no matter where that worker might be, virtual or in-person.
False Choice #3: The work we want to do, as an organization, versus the work to pay the bills, we feel we need to do.
When leading strategic planning sessions, time and again I hear executives bemoan and belittle the clients they have now and how wonderful everything would be “if only” they could attract bigger organizations with bigger budgets that would hire them on a recurring revenue basis.
So the false choice becomes whether or not to ditch one’s current clients and instead rebrand/reposition/refocus marketing and sales efforts to attract and secure those beloved “A Listers.”
The Real Choice: Just cherish and and serve our current clients, even when are not of the size or of the strategic nature that we truly desire, by recognizing:
- It is the right thing to do. They are our clients.
- Even when they are not terribly strategic nor profitable, as long as the revenues we generate from them are above our marginal cost, then they are making a valuable and hard-to-replace contribution to overhead.
- When managed right, these clients can and do create an organizational “flywheel” effect, naturally making our people and processes better in the best way possible, via the learning gained from doing real (not classroom!) work.
- We can always just work harder - spending our days serving the clients we have and our nights chasing the ones we want. Or vice versa.
False Choice #4: Between, as an organization, doing social “good” and doing well - i.e. making a lot of money (of the timely genre of how tiresome it is to listen to politicians of all stripes blame businesses for the problems of our world?).
The Real Choice. 99.9% of the time, successful businesses, via offering great products and services that people want and are willing to pay for, enable a virtuous circle of positivity that makes our modern world possible. Through these successful businesses:
- Great jobs, that allow individuals to support families and communities, are created.
- Profits, that provide the resources to invest in innovations that propel civilization forward, are generated.
- And oh yes, paid are more than a few dollars in taxes that keep all those spouting off politicians comfy in their velvet pulpits.
Yes, as entrepreneurs and executives seeking to be great, beware these false choices.
With just a little lateral thinking and planning the far better, and real choice, is there for the making.