Know When to Put Up and When to Shut Up
There's a time and a place for everything. Successful executives, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and business leaders all know when it's time to act and when it's time to shut up and listen.
Once, in a board meeting of a public company, a top executive presented plans for an acquisition. One of our directors - venture capitalist and former Intel executive Bill Davidow - typically quiet and reserved, launched into a 15 minute dissertation on why the acquisition didn't make sense because our long-term strategy wasn't clear.
That was the genesis of a much-needed and ultimately successful strategic planning process.
Then there was a board meeting - at a different public company - where our CEO presented controversial plans to launch into a completely new product direction that would have us competing head-on with Dell and Gateway. When it was time for comments, legendary venture capitalist L.J. Sevin of Sevin Rosen Funds calmly remarked, "I don't know. This whole thing just makes my butt pucker."
Now, I felt the same way, but as the newly-hired head of marketing, I had little power to stop what I also thought would be a disaster. So I remained silent. Instead, I took steps over the coming months to isolate the new product line from our otherwise healthy business and brand. So when it did indeed fail, we were able to gracefully exit the business with minimal negative impact.
Over the course of your career there will be countless opportunities to act, to take the bull by the horns and jump into the fray head first. Sometimes that's a very good idea. One of the most powerful techniques for launching a young manager's career or winning a big chunk of business is to take responsibility for solving a critical problem and then doing it. And I am a big fan of taking big risks, especially early in your career.
But then there are times when that's not such a good idea and the best thing to do is to sit back, shut up, and let business run its course. The trick is knowing how to tell the difference. Here are three tips that will help you know when to put up and when to shut up:
- Choose your battles wisely, only fight the ones you can actually win, get some allies first, and never fight on multiple fronts at once. And no, I'm not really into the whole Art of War thing; this is just something you learn from experience.
- It almost never hurts to take some time, ask around, and get your facts straight before you open your mouth. I don't care how smart or experienced you are, for any given decision there are a number of considerations you won't immediately think of but somebody else will.
- Success in business is all about how you mitigate tradeoffs. Rarely is any decision black and white. Even when you have to make quick decisions, if you don't at least give yourself enough time and gather some quality data to take a stab at analyzing the tradeoffs, you're taking a big risk.
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