American entrepreneurs and business executives don't think enough. Look at your calendar this past week - meeting after meeting. Every day is filled with endless meetings. And if not in a meeting you are on the phone, essentially having yet another meeting. Or if not on the phone, then you are pecking away on your computer, responding to an endless stream of email.

Email - now that's a brainless activity (and a CYA game too). No time for thinking while processing your emails. You are definitely not thinking when on the phone and simultaneously emailing and messing around on instant messenger.

Thinking requires quiet time, away from all interruptions. You cannot think when on the phone, in a meeting, or instant messaging.

Thinking is a hard skill to develop. Most companies' value systems do not include thinking. Not IBM though. When I joined IBM in 1984, the company handed me a stack of pocket notepads. On the cover was a single word - THINK. I also received a metal placard for my desk with the etching THINK.

In the recent book Mavericks At Work, authors Taylor and LaBarre describe Microsoft's Bill Gates process for thinking:

Bill Gates, the richest man in the world and by most accounts one of the great business geniuses of all time, offers a perfect image of the lonely leader's guide to innovation. In March 2005, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page account of Gates's secretive, twice-a-year "Think Weeks" in which the Microsoft cofounder heads off by himself, in total seclusion, to a remote cabin in the Pacific Northwest. Armed with white papers penned by Microsoft staffers, fueled by orange soda and two meals a day, Gates reads, reflects and thinks big thoughts. Among the business ideas to receive a green light from the boss after these retreats, the Journal reports, were Microsoft's Web Browser, its Tablet PC, and its online videogame business.

THINK

Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive