There is a business principle that we have all come to believe in, but practice not often enough (to put it mildly). Maybe its modern “birth” was one of Covey’s Seven Habits: “Be proactive.” But the phrase I like is “a bias for action.” Here, from an excerpt of the book A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time by Heike Bruch and Sumuntra Ghoshal, we see the need so clearly spelled out:
…inaction is indeed the rule. Despite all their knowledge and competence, despite their influence and the resources they have at their disposal, most managers spend their time making the inevitable happen – instead of putting their energy into making those exceptional things happen that create a company’s future. Faced with an opportunity to achieve something significant, beyond their routine day-to-day tasks, most managers simply do not grab it.
Here’s a question. As we look back on decisions and actions that have been made and done, how many times have we “moved too quickly” instead of “moved too slowly?”
Call this my “business introduction” to a Martin Luther King Day Reflection.
All over the internet today, we are seeing excepts and full texts of Dr. King’s greatest hits. I am still pretty convinced that his “masterpiece” is his Letter from Birmingham Jail. (But, yes a case can be made for other choices: his I Have a Dream Speech; his “Nobel Acceptance Speech” his “riff on “If I had sneezed” in his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop…” The list is long).
At the center of his Letter from Birmingham Jail is his answer to the accusation that he is wanting to move too quickly. Move too quickly? Surely you jest. Just how many decades/centuries/congresses/presidents does one have to wait to right an injustice?
The eight clergymen who wrote an open letter to Dr. King in Birmingham, urging Dr. King to put a stop to the demonstrations and work through the courts, stated:
“We recognize the natural impatience who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.”
And Dr. King responded with his Letter from Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963). In case you do not know or remember, he did continue the demonstrations, and was arrested for breaking the law. From jail, he wrote his masterpiece. Here are key excerpts:
We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say “wait.”
But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodyness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience …
As we look back, is there anyone who would argue that Dr. King wanted to move too quickly? I would argue that the fact it was as late as it was has led to negative ripple effects for decades that followed. Ripple effects that we see to this day.
Issues of race are not fully resolved. And, there are other issues facing us. And for each delay, especially when we sort of “know” what the ultimate outcome will be, we pay a heavy price tag for that delay. This is true in social issues, business issues, policy issues…
If Dr. King teaches us anything, maybe it is that a bias of action – for faster decision making, for faster action – much faster! – would be a good approach to take.
Maybe “unwise and untimely” is in fact almost always a synonym for “never.” Or, at least, for “not now – not under my leadership.” And so, the right, good, smart thing to do is kicked down the road, again, over and over again. And a bias for inaction, rather than a bias for action, rules the day.
And things get worse for our lack of courage to act.
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Here’s an excerpt from a passionate speech (fictional, but based on a true story) from the movie The Great Debaters, from the debate between Wiley College vs. Oklahoma City College, by the student Samantha Booke. Watch the speech, and read the text, here at the great American Rhetoric site.
Samantha Booke:
As long as schools are segregated, negroes will receive an education that is both separate and unequal. By Oklahoma’s own reckoning, the state is currently spending five times more for the education of a white child than it is spending to educate a colored child. That means better text books for that [white] child than for that [negro] child. Oh, I say that’s a shame. But my opponent says today is not the day for whites and coloreds to go to the same college, to share the same campus, to walk in the same classroom. Well, would you kindly tell me when is that day going to come? Is it going to come tomorrow? Is it going to come next week? In a hundred years? Never?! No, the time for justice, the time for freedom, and the time for equality, is always — is always — right now!
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