Ironic that immediately after David Brooks’ column criticizing the Tea Party movement for being too radical, Brooks publishes a column criticizing politicians’ lack of passion and commitment for fiscal responsibility:
“To actually reduce benefits and raise taxes, we’re going to need legislators who wake up in the morning passionate about fiscal sanity. The ones we have now are just making things worse.”
The management lesson to me is that — contrary to popular perception — there’s often far more pressure to say yes than to say no. This is true whether the sexy new thing is Universal Health Care or a War in Iraq or some cool new widget.
Sometimes the correct answer is Yes. Usually the correct answer is No. And the only way to be able to say Yes — and to deliver — where appropriate is to say No all the other times.
I have very mixed feelings about the Tea Party movement, but the part I love is their passion for fiscal responsibility. Any moron can increase spending and lower taxes. And any product manager can get excited about all the new great ideas that come along. But you won’t be able to deliver on any of those new ideas unless you’re very passionate about saying No to all the others. The average company is like the US government. Its biggest challenge isn’t finding great ideas. It’s finding the discipline to store up enough resources to focus on the one or two great ideas that they have.
Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/biscuitsmlp/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
SphinnCon Israel was great, thanx Barry! Thanks everyone for all your help in generating this post:
SphinnCon
Best Speakers:
Best Lines:
- Sam Michelson: You need to meet with your clients to understand what they really want. I like spending the weekend. With the ones who aren’t in jail.
Best Take-Aways:
- Gab Goldenberg: Build long term relationships, friendships, reciprocity (not trading). One of the best strategies is guest posting.
Best Gags:
- Sam Michelson: Fake slide about building reputation for the Mossad.
Best Running Jokes:
- Dixon Jones after being tweaked by Ari Ozick that Majestic has a bad UI: We have a bad UI because everybody uses Excel anyway … Then I download it into Excel, because we have a lousy UI.
Best Tweets:
- Shira Abel (@shiraabel): ohhhhhh… dangerous keywords. Oh. Not as exciting as I had hoped…
- Dan-ya Schwartz (@danjas): I wonder if @neyne knows that his computer is projected. I enjoy following the way his mind work. [I wish I were there].
Best Examples:
- Vanessa Fox: TSA’s Reputation Management success.
- Shira Abel: Lower Merion School District’s Reputation Management failure.
Best Interaction:
- Tomer Honen: Phone went off while he was speaking. Asked if it was for him, said to tell them he’s not here.
- And then Tomer again, setting up Vanessa. The exchange went something like this:
- Conference Participant: I got a message that I have too many URLs.
- Tomer: How many do you have
- Participant: About 180 million.
- [After the laughter died down the second punchline came...]
- Vanessa Fox (from the audience): I programmed that feature!
Best Live Blogging:
[I almost wrote Lisa Barone & Barry Schwartz out of habit :-). Great job by Debra.]
Also in this series:
