Make your choice
At the Economist CFO conference last week, Barclays CFO Chris Lucas discussed how the pace of decision-making has changed as a result of the financial crisis.
“There’s probably in anybody’s career six or thereabouts really important decisions that you make. It feels to me that we have probably had those six decisions that would normally be in a career in the last few years,” he said.
I thought this was an interesting suggestion, and I’m sure many of his fellow finance chiefs in the room and you reading this now can think of decisions you have made in your own career, for better or worse, that have affected its course.
But, he says, these choices have greater implications at the moment.
“Allied to those decisions it usually takes you about six years to know whether those decisions are right or wrong, and that has an enormous benefit for the people who made those decisions [because they] are not usually there to pick them up. I think the evidence [of] the rightness and wrongness of those decisions has probably been identified within six months.”
Do you agree with his summary of events? Are you reaping (or suffering) the consequences of decisions made six months ago?
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For entrepreneurs, 6 months are not enough. As the term implies, decisions are entrepreneurial. Loss at the start is understandable in view of investment on fixed assets and recurrent operating expenses. Often, it takes a year or so to break even. I got that experience on starting a takeaway for pleasure ten years ago. I could not stand loss at time. Even after just 6 months, I sold the business. Just a few days ago, I took up an entrepreneurial decision of joining a sn IT business as self-employed contractor.
On the other hand, for employees, 6 months are long enough to decide upon staying or quitting. Should there be no prospects, they must quit. Remember “make hay while the sun shines” or it will be mere waste of resources, say, time.