But however you do it, the key is to ensure that people have no ambiguity about their deadlines, that they are committed to meeting them, and that you have a culture where missing deadlines is simply not an option. And that, in turn, means you need people who have the discipline to refuse to commit to deadlines that they cannot hit. If deadline slippage becomes routine, then deadlines do more harm than good.

So you can’t wait for perfect data. It doesn’t exist. You just have to take that first step into the unknown. Combine everything you’ve learned and take your best guess at what’s going to happen next. That’s what life is. Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.

Far too many people expect profitability, for the product and the business, right out of the gate. When I was at Philips I watched most new product categories and businesses on their slate get cancelled—even for products that were almost ready to ship. Built. Tested. Done. They would die on the vine because the top brass were protecting themselves. Any execs

joining the team always wanted a near guarantee that new products would make money. [See also: Chapter 2.2: Data Versus Opinion: Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions.]

They demanded to be shown ahead of time that the unit and business economics of the product were sound. But that was impossible.

They were asking us to predict the future with near 100 percent confidence. They were asking for proof that a baby could run a marathon before it had even learned to walk.

These guys didn’t know much about babies. They knew even less about how to create a new business.

This is the puzzle of trying to understand randomness: Real patterns are mixed in with random events, so it is extraordinarily difficult for us to differentiate between chance and skill. Did you arrive early to work because you left on time, planned ahead, and drove carefully? Or were you just in the right place at the right time? Most people would choose the former answer without a second thought - without even acknowledging the latter was an option. As we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn’t.

The decision to disrupt businesses that are fundamentally working but whose future is in question—intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope of generating long-term growth—requires no small amount of courage. Routines and priorities get disrupted, jobs change, responsibility is reallocated. People can easily become unsettled as their traditional way of doing business begins to erode and a new model emerges. It’s a lot to manage, from a personnel perspective, and the need to be present for your people—which is a vital leadership quality under any circumstances—is heightened even more. It’s easy for leaders to send a signal that their schedules are too full, their time too valuable, to be dealing with individual problems and concerns. But being present for your people—and making sure they know that you’re available to them—is so important for the morale and effectiveness of a company.