Alan Webber wrote a book called Rules of Thumb, which is a collection of 52 life lessons. In a recent article he reviewed 3 rules from that book that he thought are especially interesting at these times.
I liked rule #4 very much: Don't implement solutions, prevent problems
This statements leads to some very interesting thoughts. First, of course it would be much better if managers were able to anticipate issues and prevent problems instead of firefighting. But on the other hand we also tend to praise and admire those managers that were able to go through tough times solving huge problems. We even like to ask questions during interviews trying to find out how the manager we are interviewing was able to solve difficult problems under tough circumstances. How do you evaluate the ability of someone to avoid problems by anticipating them?
Surely, the business results from a manager capable of preventing problems will be much better than one who is not, but how do you know if the result were good because of the "preventing problems" capability or anything else?
Maybe this is why we don't have the type of managers we really need and have more managers that implement solutions, instead of managers that prevent problems.
What are your thoughts about this?
