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My father, a Naval officer, was quite fond of shouting "Do something, even if it's stupid!" I expect that, in the heat of battle, indecision is worse than nothing at all.
Back in the day I worked for Dave Johnson's Working Software. We scored a big contract to port Random House Webster's Electronic Dictionary And Thesaurus College Edition - yes that was its real name - from MS-DOS to Mac OS System 7. Included in our contract was $5,000 "Timely Completion Bonus" of which I would receive $3k but only if I completed the work in the allotted time.
I found myself strangely unable to get started. Dave from time to time would politely ask me whether I had, then finally he got very assertive that I should start.
"Look: if you write anything at all, even if it crashes then you can debug it."
I remembered this recently, and it is working well for me. One must not implement too much buggy code or you will never get it debugged, but writing something bad then fixing it may well be better than not implementing anything at all.
(I got my bonus.)
(Score: 3, Informative) by tathra on Wednesday April 22 2015, @02:52AM
for leaders nowadays we say "the only bad decision is none at all". indecisiveness will get your troops killed; taking any action at all is better than standing there stupified and getting slaughtered, at least if you're doing something, even if its not the best plan, it may create an opportunity. this advice, however, is basically for when lives are on the line, and doing nothing is a guaranteed death. if you have the time to think and make plans and try to come up with a decent decision or plan, you absolutely should, but still, anything is better than nothing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ticho on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:28AM
No, something "doing anything" ends up worse than doing nothing. I see it every day in corporate IT, with standard middle management kneejerk approach "eek, something has to be done, let's just do anything, QUICKLY!"
*shudders*
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday April 22 2015, @07:10AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by ticho on Wednesday April 22 2015, @08:06AM
Not every post is written to refute or fight its parent post. I stand by what I wrote (minus the brainfart of writing "something" instead of "sometimes" near the start, which may have caused a misunderstanding or two).
(Score: 2) by tathra on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:25PM
and in the case of business there's pretty much always plenty of time to think and come up with a proper plan, with the proper plan sometimes being doing nothing. the problem there is that they're idiots and don't understand that the advice is for crisis situations, not everyday life.