The default rule across almost all US states is that either party may end the employment relationship at any time, for any reason that is not illegal, without notice. Whatever else it does, it makes staffing decisions fast. A manager who wants to change a team can change it this week.
The golden hour
American trauma medicine is built around the idea that the first hour after serious injury determines survival. R Adams Cowley in Baltimore made it doctrine, and the US trauma system — helicopters, designated trauma centres, rapid transport — was designed around it.
Researchers have since questioned whether sixty minutes is a meaningful threshold. The system it produced is real regardless, and it was built on the premise that speed is the treatment.
Bystander CPR
American public health has spent decades training ordinary people to start chest compressions immediately rather than wait for professionals, and has simplified the instruction repeatedly to lower the barrier to starting. The campaign is not about doing it well. It is about doing it now.
Just do it
Nike, 1988. Three words, an imperative, and no object — it does not say what to do. The sentence assumes the deliberation has gone on too long and supplies the only missing ingredient.
Ready, aim, fire
The correct sequence exists in English and is used mainly to mock people who follow it too literally. Analysis paralysis names the failure state, paralysis by analysis is the older form, and both treat thinking as a thing that can go on too long and become a disease.
Action items
The American meeting produces action items, and a meeting that produces none is described as having gone nowhere. Not conclusions, not understandings, not positions. Items — countable, assigned, with a name next to each.
Bias toward action
Named as a virtue and used in hiring and promotion. Amazon lists it among its leadership principles: speed matters in business, and many decisions are reversible and do not need extensive study. The word bias is chosen deliberately — it concedes that the tendency is not neutral, and recommends it anyway.
Get the ball rolling
Along with hit the ground running, let’s get moving, time to pull the trigger, let’s make it happen. Five ordinary American phrases, all about starting, all impatient. There is no equally common family of phrases for pausing to think further.
Executive
The American word for a senior manager comes from execute — to carry out. Not director, not leader, not chief. The person is named after the act of doing.
The 80 percent solution
American military and business usage: a good plan executed now beats a perfect plan executed later. The claim is not that 80 percent is acceptable, but that the remaining 20 percent costs more in delay than it returns in quality.