In Amazon’s 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote that most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had — and that if you wait for 90 percent, in most cases you are being slow.
He added the necessary companion: either way, you need to be good at quickly recognising and correcting bad decisions.
The threshold is named as a number, published to shareholders, and adopted across American business as a rule of thumb.
The term iteration has become common within American companies: to communicate several or many communications, back and forth, between two or more parties, in which information is exchanged, decisions made, activities (action items or more simply actions) agreed to.
Merriam-Webster online defines iteration as a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result.
Americans iterate, some intensely so. It allows them to maintain flexibility, to ensure information flow, to discriminate between what is important and unimportant, to reduce risk. Like any strength, however, it can be inflationary: too much communication, too little action.
Instead of front-loading an agreement with in-depth discussion about the details, Americans iterate.
Americans reserve the right to back out of an agreement at any time during its early stages. This sounds like a contradiction in terms, in the sense that once an agreement has been made, one should keep their word.
It is not. American agreements in their early stages are agreements in the making, they are under consideration, are conditional. Americans will do their best to deliver what they have agreed to, if they can, are permitted to, if time and resources enable them.
To go into too much detail of an agreement up front is a potential waste of time and effort. Americans want first the very basics of the agreement, in order to quickly assess whether they can and want to enter into it.
If the initial response is positive, they will enter further into the agreement, taking in more details, proceeding if they can, are permitted to, if time and resources enable them.
It is a step by step process, and not an all or nothing decision.
In American culture, waiting until you have all of the information is considered so negative that there are many popular phrases and quotes that warn against this behavior. Some of the best known follow:
“He who hesitates is lost” – a person who spends too much time deliberating before acting will lose the chance to act at all. The first use of this phrase in the United States was in 1858 in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes, although the phrase was first used in England in 1712 in Cato by Joseph Addison.
Liars always hesitate – a person who hesitates before speaking is probably not telling the truth.
The earliest practical form of programming is generally considered to have been done by Joseph Jaquard in France in 1804. Jaquard designed a loom that would perform certain tasks when the appropriate punched cards were fed through a reading device.
Since 1804, programming has become much more commonplace, and new computer programs are produced every day. In order to keep up with the competition, most software companies will begin selling programs long before they’re perfect, only to release updates and newer versions as the programmers correct flaws and add new features.
Anyone who waits until their program is perfect to market it will find that their program is obsolete when it finally goes on sale.
An additional purpose of follow up in the American context is to signal to the other parties that the agreement is still of high priority. No or late follow up can be interpreted as a signal that the agreement is no longer important to the other party.
Americans place a very high value on flexibility, on the ability to respond to the needs of the market, of customers, of changing situations. Big decisions are broken down into smaller ones. Isolating individual decisions allows for rapid reaction as well as rapid revision. Up to the minute overview of agreements is essential.
Follow-up is omnipresent in American life. The preference setting of email programs, social network accounts, as well as information sources can be set so that information is pushed immediately to the user.
Most doctors offices send out reminders to patients of their upcoming appointments via traditional mail, email and even voicemail. When one turns on the television five minutes prior to the show they want to watch, one sees a reminder indicating that the program they are want to watch is about to be shown. Banks offer depositors the option of immediate notification via email or text message of any changes to their balance.
Follow-up is in many cases simply a reminder.
First-mover advantage is gained by the first significant player in a market segment who gains control of resources that other participants in the market cannot match. Amazon had a first mover advantage over Barnes & Noble. Amazon maintained its advantage by partnering with Borders and extending product offerings into apparel, electronics, toys and housewares.
Rarely is a project, large or small, completed within schedule, within budget and meeting fully, much less exceeding, the specifications of the customer. The business world is seldom that simple. In the American business context quality is more likely to be sacrificed than schedule or budget. Americans expect products and services on-time, and at the price they agreed to. Quality – in the sense of completeness – can be made up for with extra effort.
When it comes to that magic triangle – schedule, budget, quality – the first two usually trump the third, in the U.S.
Trump. A card of a suit any of whose cards will win over a card that is not of this suit —called also trump card; a decisive overriding factor or final resource.
General George Smith Patton Jr. was born in California in 1885. From an early age he heard stories about his war-hero ancestors who fought in the American Revolution and the Civil War. Intent on following in their footsteps, Patton attended Virginia Military Institute and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
George Patton fought in his first battle in 1915 at Fort Bliss along the Mexican border during the Border War. He also served in France during WWI, where he became one of the leading experts in tank warfare. During WWII Patton served as a general, commanding the 7th U.S. Army in the invasion of Sicily and the 3rd U.S. Army during the French invasion.
Patton was considered one of the most successful combat generals in U.S. history, and his apparent battle-lust earned him the nickname “Old Blood and Guts.” A harsh commander, he was once almost discharged for slapping a soldier whom he thought was behaving cowardly.
He was known for making quick decisions, and once famously said “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
Decisions are not made in a vacuum. American decision-making allows itself to be influenced by external factors. External customers, company-internal partners, suppliers, changing management priorities, budgets and manpower all can have impact on individual decisions. American decision making aims to be market-driven.
Market-driven in the U.S. means making decisions based on the market‘s rhythm. If necessary, Americans will skip over steps in their decision making approach.
To turn on a dime: To take a very tight turn, used especially for a vehicle; to change direction quickly. A dime is the smallest in size of American coins.
Experience: To encounter or undergo (an event or occurrence); to feel (an emotion); practical contact with and observation of facts or events; the knowledge or skill acquired by such means over a period of time, especially that gained in a particular profession by someone at work; an event or occurrence that leaves an impression on someone (a learning experience).
Down and dirty: Americans are not perfectionists. The goal is seldom the optimal decision, but instead the most effective decision under the given circumstances. Often timely decisions, even if suboptimal, are the best decisions. They can be corrected.
The American tendency to work at a fast pace and aim for rapid results continues to confound Germans. They have difficulty identifying a logical and structured plan for action amongst their business dealings, and where Americans see hard work and flexibility in action, they suspect only chaos. When Germans feel overrun by American ‘decisionism’ and see their standards of quality and the rhythm of their own style of working as becoming endangered, this confusion can quickly transform into irritation.
“A bad decision is better than no decision.” There are few Americans likely to disagree with this popular saying. Germans, however, would tend towards saying the exact opposite. Sometimes even a good decision will find no supporters.
From the American perspective, it is the client who is the most significant factor in determining the deadline for a given decision. Americans value a client-oriented business model. Because Americans tend to operate under the assumption that this same dynamic exists in in Germany as well, they find it difficult to understand why their German colleagues would risk upsetting a customer over time wasted during the decision-making process.
Priorities and time factors can change during the process of making any decision. Americans prefer to divide this process up into multiple sub-processes or steps. The sequence of these steps must remain flexible – meaning that it should be possible to change their order, or even skip a step or two in between if necessary. From this point of view, the structured discipline of the German decision-making process can appear exceedingly rigid and in-flexible – occasionally appearing as though it would directly conflict with the purpose of the decision itself.
It is almost as though the decision-making process would be more important than the final decision. To Americans, the German approach of assigning so much importance to the process of making a decision as to possibly loose perspective of the final decision itself can seem rather paradoxical. For this reason, one might suspect that simple indecision is being masked by a seeming concern for ‘attention to detail’.
Of course the German understandings of process and customer relations play a role here (according to the motto: ‘The client wants a solution from us. Our processes guarantee a solution, so the client knows that he can wait.’) But surely there must be something more involved; Germans can see that during the process of making an important decision one must also make a series of decisions which are smaller, but not insignificant to the bigger picture. These decisions are key elements of a systematic (or self-perpetuating) approach, each de facto requiring more time for consideration.
Ultimately, whether or not the rebounding American approach – making quick decisions, then revising them just as quickly – is actually faster typically depends on the related events. ‘Wir haben mit Äpfeln und Birnen zu tun’ – you can’t compare apples and oranges (or pears). Nevertheless, there will always be those colleagues who will continue do do so, and continue to bicker.