Information vs. Decision

We were in a meeting last Tuesday with our architect so he could show us some preliminary drawings of the space. When I say "we", I mean Melissa (VP of whatever is artful and creative), Alain (VP just cause he wants to be), myself (President, this is just a title, trust me the other 3 still run the company) and my mom, VP of very slow decisions!!!

Which brings me to my little blog or as Al Pacino would say in Scarface: " Say hello to my little friend". My mom is the most experienced in the restaurant business, I mean you could add all my experience, Alain's and Melissa's experience in the resto business and we would still come short compare to her. Therefore her input is very important, she is very insightful and very helpful. I found however that in order for me to get her to make a decision, its like pulling teeth , but less painful. She wants to have information, information, information.

Do you know anyone like that? They are information data "HOG" (you guys know the Greek word for hog). Give me a lot of information give me, give me, give me, is their motto. So I started wondering where I stood in all this, I figured out that I was in the same category as the information nerd, man did I feel like a donkey (due to the sensitive nature of the donkey in Greek, we decided to use the English version!).

This brought me to ask myself, do we need ALL the information order to make the decisions? Do we ALWAYS required 100% of the fact in order to make a decision? In other words, if the guy falls unconscious do we need all the information of why, how and when he fell unconscious before calling 911?

Did you know that most CEO make 80% of their decision based on only 20% of the information? Which might explain why we are in the mess we are today....hahahahaha.... PSYCH. Seriously, CEOs are not well paid because of 80% of their decision, they are well paid because they have to make the tough calls, the rest of the 20%, that most of us wouldn't know what to do with, but they still make decisions without ALL the facts.

Here is what I am starting to understand of decision making, by the way pay attention to all of you who lead in any kind of position, decision making is not the be all and end all.

Make a decision follow it and be humble enough to back track if you find out it is the wrong decision. If you made the wrong call say you are sorry and move on, chances are that the rest of your team figured you screwed up before you did, so they won't be surprise when you say "I am sorry", actually they probably will say:"Thank you, now can we move on".

Where does it bring us? Crap if I know, all I know is that if you lead, you are not there to gather information but to make decision.