Episode #60 Haste Makes Waste

Modern life is full of contradictions. We have vast computing power in the palms of our hands. Yet, some choose to play mindless games on their device. Others are busily scrolling through the detritus of other people social media postings. Observations like “Oh look at what that cat is doing!” needlessly cloud our brains. Yet we are busy, aren’t we. We are actually more than busy, in fact, we are in a rush. We need to gain every possible second, so we can spend it later adding comments to someone’s irrelevant on-line post. In the process, we are losing touch with how to engage people. Passively devouring social media cannot be a game changer, yet this is how precious moments are being spent today. In Japanese they say “kuki wo yomu” or read the air, but in this hustling life we can miss the context, miss the bigger picture. This is not a cost free exercise folks.

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

Japan is among the biggest users of robots in the world, with three hundred and three robots per ten thousand employees in 2016. This is the fourth largest globally, according to the International Federation Of Robotics. What does Japan think the future looks like workwise? The Pew Research Center noted that eighty nine percent of Japanese were saying it was “probable” or “definite”, that robots and computers will take over many of the jobs currently being done by humans. This percentage was the second highest among nations surveyed. Seventy four percent thought people would have difficulty finding new jobs after being replaced by a robot. Eighty three percent saw economic inequality worsening. Only thirty five percent thought there would be better, higher paying jobs available as a result of robots and computers taking over most work currently done by humans. In other news, OECD data shows that in 2016, the Japanese created forty one dollars and fifty four cents in GDP for every hour worked, below the OECD average of forty six dollars and ninety eight cents. The Group of Seven average was fifty five dollars and thirty nine cents. Japan’s GDP per hour worked is the lowest in the G7 and lower than all the major economies in the OECD except Korea. Japan’s productivity remains significantly lower that the United States at sixty three dollars twenty six cents, the EU at fifty seven dollars and sixty four cents and roughly half that of top ranked Ireland at eighty two dollars and fifteen cents. Maybe we need those robots here after all to improve productivity or encourage more Irish migrants to move here.

This is episode number sixty one and we are talking about how Haste Makes Waste in Business. Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.

Is speed in business expensive? Pushing ourselves to go faster and faster is getting crazier. It is not all upside though. Constant hustling can lead to large and small errors of judgment. We get so caught up in living twenty four seven lifestyles that we start missing big pieces of the success puzzle. People are the key to most businesses, but look at how we treat them. We push past them to get into the subway car or we block the train exit corridor, because we are transfixed by a tiny screen. We cut drivers off in traffic to get a ten second edge. We try to barge into elevators before the occupants have all moved out. We dither around and then hit the panic button on a piece of work and make everyone jump through hoops to make sure the deadline is met. We either end the sentence for the person we are speaking with or we cut them off and lunge in with our own preferred words and ideas instead.

Doing more, faster with less, we are constantly hustling, hustling to gain time. The process becomes addictive. The unrelenting daily email tsunami pushes us to gain extra time - all the time. You would never know that the subway trains arrive every two minutes in Tokyo, by the desperate way some people are scrambling to get into carriages. This unquenchable thirst for saving seconds becomes our norm. Our “contemplative self” is subsumed by the “mad rush us”, leaping around like a lunatic. We start to lose awareness of the impact we are having on those around us. Our words and actions become one-way traffic as we do unto others, as we dictate. What do we all preach though? Customer focus, good listening skills, sensitivity to the client’s needs, consultative sales techniques, etc.

Decades ago I saw a very funny Mr. Boo Chinese comedy, in which the hero Mr. Boo steps on the toe of another passenger in the subway car, doesn’t apologise and gets into an argument with the stranger. In the next scene, he is visiting the house of his new girlfriend and of course the father turns out to be the gentleman he was rude to in the train. Very funny, as we watch him squirm in his embarrassment.

Imagine if every interaction you have with others, where you are overly focused on hustling for your personal gain, came back to haunt you like Mr. Boo’s father of the girlfriend experience. How would this change your behavior? You would definitely take more care about the people around you, how you spoke with others and your general interactions with humanity. You would start aligning a lot more of those heroic, beautifully framed and wall mounted Vision, Mission and Value statements with your actions. You would start to value the input of others, because for the first time in a long time, you would actually be paying full attention to what others are saying. You would become more considerate of others. Why aren’t we doing this now?

The slow food movement was a reaction to the impersonalisation of the food service industry. It was a getting back to the basics, the fundamentals approach. We need a slow business movement to help us do the same thing in the way we run our businesses. Scrambling for extra seconds, so that we can spend more time glued to screens featuring Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, email etc., is actually pretty pathetic, when you sit back and take in what we are all busily doing with our time. Is the content of social media really that valuable or are we living our lives vicariously through the goings on of others, most of whom we have never even met? Scrolling through their posts we lose time and we lose our focus on more important tasks. Is this what we were so vigorously gaining those additional seconds for by constantly cutting corners? Ask yourself what are you doing with the additional time you have managed to squeeze out of your day? Are you employing it productively?

Contemplation as an idea is vaporizing right in front of us as we constantly hustle. Context is down for the count. Self awareness is in increasingly short supply. Who we really are and what we actually stand for in our value system is getting badly bent out of shape. When we are madly running around, we are not focused on what is going on around us. We are just rushing to the next spot, because we are in the zone. We can’t see ourselves as others see us.

This is a product of the haste of modern life, a life bristling with technology that is supposed to save us time. Actually, we feel more time poor than any time in the past. This is the irony. We are wasting our time at a prodigious speed. Time is life, so what does this tell us about how we are living our lives? This indecent desire for speed comes at a price and we need to be vigilant about the consequences.

One of the things I really admire about Japanese society is how, with a massive population living cheek by jowl for centuries, they have managed to remain so considerate of others. As busy as this society is, and it is super busy here in Tokyo, they have maintained a decorum with each other that is admirable. What are we doing by comparison? Are we focused on the people around us or on our phone, on their feelings or our racing internal clock? There is a cost to being in a constant hurry and that is the diminishment of the strength of our relationships. That is an expensive transaction right there, in the modern business world where gaining trust is paramount.

So if you find yourself constantly hustling like mad, stop and ask yourself, what is the cost of all this speed? What is this all for? What am I actually doing with all of these contraband minutes? Ask yourself, “am I doing the thing at this moment that is the best use of my time?”. Unleash the contemplative you instead and practice tuning yourself into other people. Get your face out of your screen and on to the big picture. This is the universal, timeless, key business success skill – the quality of our ability to do well in our engagement with others based on shared trust. Our modern instinctive rushing, rushing, rushing all the time can mean we are in danger of losing this vital business success skill. How is it going for you? Have you got it or have you lost it?

Action Steps:

1. Develop more self awareness
2. Give people your 100% attention when you engage with them
3. Prioritise contemplation
4. Make haste slowly