The 3am Decision Case

It's 3am. The children are safe and asleep. The phone is ringing in the White House. Something is happening in the world. Who do you want answering the phone ? Sound familiar? Yeah, it's the famous '3am Hillary phone call' ad campaign for the Democrat's presidential nomination. The answer is supposed to be clear: it's Hillary Clinton who already knows the world leaders, knows the military, someone tested to lead in the dangerous world.

Barack Obama was quick to response in a speech countering the experience Hillary is portraying. The question is not about who's picking up the phone. The question is what kind of judgement that you excercise when picking up the phone. By now, there are a few hundreds parodies written with regard to this 3am phone call. Some jokingly questioned why Hillary was dressed up with make-up at 3am?. And oddly enough, one of the kids sleeping in the bed is grown up now, a young lady named Casey Knowles that support Obama! What a joke.

Anyhow, making a critical decision at 3am must be very tough, let alone dealing with world affairs of urgent matters that might have long lasting impacts. It takes both proven experience
and good judgement to deal with it. In smaller scale, the same token shall apply to the business and corporate matters. We see many great leaders sucessfully grow the business and prosper the people within the business and the community. Yet, many good leader failed.

Coming up with sound decisions, timely and well considered, are sometime quite a challenge in day-to-day business operations. In one extreme, there are managers that often go making impulsive decisions, anything as long as it's good for him/her or his/her divsion, caring less that it might have impacts to others. In other extreme, we have managers that are not comfortable making important decision, let alone tough ones. Years back, I was curious as not being able to invite some managers in our important meetings. It turned out that it was not because they were so busy with other more important stuffs, but it's more that they did not want to end up in a situation at the meeting that they had to make (key) decisions!. It's ironic that they were expensive because they were supposed to make (tough) decisions in the first place.

Personal background and cultural-social environment have for sure some contributing factors in decision making process. More importantly, we could observe that we most of the time do not prepare our people in systematic ways to assume business leadership. We shall start with the new recruits. We have spent extra efforts to bring in the best fresh graduates. We then need an established program to grow them in their early career years. Yes, there are some good management trainee programs in some companies. Yet, it only for few selected people. The majority comes in thru regular pipe. Some have programs to widen their horizon within the first 3-4 career years. They would need to be rotated to gain technical experience, oriented to have business exposures, and got in touch with management awareness as to how the whole things get integrated and moving.

Key element missing in such porgram as I observe is the exposure to making business decisions. It's worth the efforts for them undergoing a systematic program in a way that would be confronted to make a real decision as we prepare them to become future leaders. Let them go thru case by case and learn first to have the courage to decide and then make well-considered decisions. Good ones and bad ones, and later on try to deal with a '3am situation'.

In recent recruitment interview with a number of candiates graduated from best schools with excellent GPA, I posed a question of 'what is the biggest and toughest decisions you've ever made in your life' ?. I virtually ended up staring at blank faces, with some managed to refer to few daily routines. It's imperative that we have to train our guys to get used to making tough choices - with well-thought consideration, understanding the impact to overall business, putting aside any super-ego and emotional attachment. Although, good decisions do not automatically yield good or best results as there are some unknown factors usually involved. But, statistically, decisions made with good processes and apropriate tools would in general make a good outcome that can responsibly be accounted for. With it, we could hope to have good leaders in the future that intelectually mature enough to make decisions that might impact the lives of many people. Proven experience and good judgement. When you become powerful leader, you'd better need it.

Advice from Spiderman passed on from Uncle Ben to all of us, especially to Obama, Clinton, and McCain, with great power comes great responsibilty. Use it very, very wisely.