Decision making | Strategy Execution Institute®

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You would think “leadership” is popular because it needs to be popular. If we had to quantify it, how would we do so? Lets look at the number of books that are written on the subject. A search on Amazon.com for “Leadership” yields 98,449 results.

Search results for “Leadership” on Amazon.com

A search on Google.com yields 456 million results. Upon a whim, I used http://books.google.com/ngrams/ to find out how many times the work “leadership” was used in the books digitized by Google. This is what I got:

Google ngram for “Leadership”

I was positive that “leadership” is more popular than “management” but to my surprise, I got the following results in the same site:

Google ngram for “Management” and “Leadership”

Now if you think about it, people read about topics other than “leadership” and “management.” I chose some random topics and here is what I got:

Google ngram for various words.

You can draw you own conclusions! I know you will see the logical fallacy right away, but it is an amusing exercise nevertheless. (Let me know what you think in the comments!)

The point is, attempts to quantify can be interesting, but don’t get carried away!

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I was asked recently, “If what I am doing is working, do I really need to know how and why?” I could see why this question was being asked. After all, if we start worrying about the how and why of all the problems we solve, our output would decline, and our nerves would be frazzled. I believe the expression for this is “analysis paralysis.”

Here is a guideline I proposed to break the deadlock. If the problem relates to your core competence, and is critical for your success, and something you use in your point of performance, then you need to know the how and why. For exceptions, see next para.

There is a further clarification, if no one has understood the how and why, then it is a research project. Don’t proceed unless you have funding or time and money to burn. But if at least one other person has understood the how and why, then it is a best practice, you would do well to reach out to learn more.

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Category Archives: Decision making

#128 Is “leadership” popular?

#125 How much do you need to know?