Thinking – A Lost Art
This might sound harsh, and I'll concede that it's certainly something that's bugged me at more than one job over the years, but it's also why I end up being highly paid and one of the more influential people at those jobs as well. It's really simple.
Thinking has become a lost art.
It's like everything else in life, you have to work at it to get good at it. You can't do it just a bit, and think you're 'good to go' for a while. Nope. Thinking is something you have to really work on, and really apply on a daily basis to keep sharp on the skill.
Why is it so important? Because no matter what you do in life, thinking will make you more efficient and better at it. Period.
You want to manage technical people? You need to think. In something that happened to be recently, a manager asked to look at all the outcomes of a matching. But didn't even stop to do the simple math that what he was asking for was in excess of 8 million matches. Even at a few minutes per match, that's way way too long to really be a useful strategy. Had I followed his advice, we'd have a giant Excel spread sheet that no one could open, and we'd still be going through the data.
Think, people! Think!
Don't just act… Think!
I recently read a story about two very famous original Unix architects that were sitting at a workstation (because they were scarce) and when there was a bug, one started hitting the debugger, and the other stopped doing anything -- he started thinking. His approach was that if you understood the system, then debugging was in your head. Thinking was more powerful than doing.
This isn't an invitation to analysis paralysis - that's taking something to an extreme. But you can't shoot first and ask questions later, either. Certainly when you're doing a lot of technical managing.
So let's all practice this a little more, OK?