Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event). The tremendous amount of computer information may thus shut out access to reality.

As Chip and Nancy put it, for people afflicted with component focus, “wholes are not the ‘sum of their parts,’ they are a function of one part.” The deeper a person’s expertise, the worse this narrow focus gets. Chip and Nancy show how “the curse of knowledge” accentuates the coordination troubles caused by component focus: Experts wrongly assume that—because a subject comes so easily to them after learning about it for years—what they know is obvious and can quickly be grasped by others. Experts unwittingly create coordination snafus by failing to pass along essential information to people in other positions and fields because they assume it is self-evident. Or, when they try to pass information along, experts provide explanations they believe are easy to understand but are incomprehensible to people who aren’t indoctrinated into their circle.

Here are five ways that excessive speed brings out the worst in people, which in turn damages organizations.

1. Burnout

Burned-out employees feel tired, down, frustrated, hopeless, cynical, and numb—and their performance and productivity suffer...

2. Selfishness

When people are in a big hurry, they fixate so much on tasks that they don’t slow down to offer a kind word or lend a hand to others and become oblivious to people who need their help....

3. Bullying

Ohio State’s Ben Tepper developed a measure of abusive supervision more than twenty years ago, which has since been used in many studies on the causes and consequences of such nastiness. Ben’s measure lists fifteen behaviors that nightmare bosses heap on subordinates, including “is rude to me,” “expresses anger at me when he/she is mad for another reason,” “tells me I am incompetent,” and “puts me down in front of others.” Once again, time pressure is a major culprit. Dozens of studies that use this and related measures find that exhausted bosses stressed by constant struggles with deadlines are prone to abuse their subordinates—who respond by becoming anxious, depressed, physically ill, and less productive, and by quitting their jobs...

4. Bad Decisions

When people try to accomplish things too fast, don’t pause to think, and trigger a cycle of recrimination and anxiety, the frenzy imposes a “bandwidth tax” that results in lousy decisions. Worse, their narrow focus on current troubles hinders them from confronting new problems before they get out of control and prevents people from doing the kinds of long-term thinking and planning that separates good friction fixers and organizations from bad ones...

Daniel Kahneman’s research, cited in chapter 2, shows that when you are in a “cognitive minefield,” when you don’t know what to do or things are going badly, it is best to slow down, ask for advice, and weigh pros and cons. The first decision that pops into your mind is probably flawed because it’s based on biases and a shallow understanding of your choices. The hazards of time pressure also pervade research on locomotion, which, as we saw earlier in this chapter, shows that when people fixate on speed, they take shortcuts and even break laws...

5. Kills Creativity

Teresa Amabile and her colleagues reached a similar conclusion after analyzing nine thousand daily diary entries from 177 employees on twenty-two project teams. Theresa’s team developed a nuanced measure of daily creativity based on employee reports of discovery, generating ideas, thinking flexibly, learning, and enhanced self-awareness. Their findings revealed that “when creativity is under the gun, it usually ends up getting killed.” Each day, participants rated how much time pressure they felt on a seven-point scale....

Getting relief from physical, emotional, or psychological discomfort is also a positive experience. It’s three a.m. and you are having another bout of insomnia. You’re restless and thinking about work. There’s a big deadline tomorrow, and everyone is rushing to get a project out the door. You’re the manager, so you’ve got to keep things moving. And as you lie there awake, you’re worried that there will be a productivity bottleneck in your inbox tomorrow morning. The thought of it makes you anxious. So you roll over, grab your phone off the nightstand, and check your e-mail. Whew, nothing urgent. No need to respond to anything. You feel relieved. This is a positive experience that you’ll seek the next time you wake up in the middle of the night. You check your inbox and once again you feel relief. And then checking your e-mail will start becoming a habit. During some of my corporate speaking events, I’ve asked audiences if this sounds familiar. At times, well over 30 percent have raised their hands and acknowledged this habit. Little did they know that relief was the cause.

Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event). The tremendous amount of computer information may thus shut out access to reality.