Moving on in our look at Napoleon, let’s look at his views on time.
“Strategy is the art of making use of time and space.
I am less concerned about the latter than the former.
Space we can recover, lost time never.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
In a world where we’re often more concerned with meetings and consultations than with direct actions, it’s easy to lose track of the importance of time.
One way to deal with this is to empower your employees for more direct actions, or at least remove some of the impediments. How can you speed things up so that new projects can be approved quicker? This is a question you should be asking yourself. While a certain amount of care and research is necessary, too much delay can mean that you’re behind the times before you even start.
So, eliminate red-tape where you can. Rules and regulations are like a good garden. To be healthy, they need to be pruned now and again. If you can get ahead of the curve, people will react to you instead of you reacting to them.
Originally posted on May 28, 2006 @ 2:01 pm