How To Make Good Decisions Part 2

Let's continue on talking on. This will be part two. That's two for you non Greeks. How to make good great decisions. We talked about laws, principles and preferences the last time. Now let's talk about another thing is rules versus guidelines. And this goes about, you can call it's the same thing of laws versus principles. It's another way of looking at the same thing. But it's important to see the difference between these. See, rules are things like laws, true all the time, but they're also the trouble with rules is you have to, they must be enforced. And you have no wiggle room, you have no humanity. And even the courts and the judicial system, you know how many times you hear where's the heart? That's the law. But what's the spirit of the law? Well, when you get into rules, so much of it is cut and dry. It's cold blooded. There's no humanity in there, that's just a rule. And if you make a mistake, if you bungle. The trouble about humans is we make mistakes. And so that's why you like to stay out of the arena of the rules and more in the arena of the guidelines. And when there are certain principles of nature, the difference in guideline is pretty much stuff you come up with. When we were talking on the earlier tape, we were talking about the way things are in the world, the way things go. There are laws, there are principles, and then there are just preferences where you can have your own say. But when it comes to you making your own guidelines and rules and establish how things are going to go in your company, your family, your business, your school, where you're in charge, your agency, this is now you can either, what you come up with is either going to be in the area of rules or guidelines. Rules don't give any flexibility. These give you flexibility and it gives you a chance to have the human touch. And also see, rules are rigid in the sense that if there's an infraction, you gotta go in there and investigate. Here you can say, I'm not gonna waste time on that. It's not that important. I'm gonna get the major things done, not the minors. Here you can waste a lot of time on unimportant things. Whereas you don't have, and you don't have the luxury of saying we're just not gonna get sidetracked on that like you can with a guideline. You can say, well, they didn't do it. Exactly right, we're just not going to sweat it. Let me give you an Example of, like nascar, if you go to. Or any kind of racetrack. If you go to a racetrack, you have. I'm going to dazigrate my skills here. We have Talladega, there's a racetrack, and then you got the cars going around. And see, all of these racetracks are different. See, in Talladega, you have this little thing here. I made that up. All right. Okay, so here we go. And we've got our little cars, and they're going around and they're, you know, you got a bunch of them and they're. As they come around. Well, let's just say they come around this corner and Labonte bumps Earnhardt. Earnhardt's up. You know, Earnhardt's moving in the corner. Labonte comes up or Waltrip or somebody. Jimmie Johnson, he comes up and he bumps him into here, and he spins around and this, that and the other. But then he turns around and he gets back out here. Well, now, the path that they're supposed to be making four or five hundred trips around is this oval. You're supposed to go around there. That's the story. That's the path. You're not supposed to make any little side trips in here. So if you were saying, trying to be a nitpicker, and it was a rule, they could never go outside these lines, well, then he's out of the race because he got bumped. You can say, well, maybe that, you know, gave him here. You can't say it saved any space. But let's say they're coming around this corner, they're around here, and he bumps him. You know, he comes in there and he knocks Earnhardt in. And Earnhardt's able to maybe come in here and cut off a little bit of this corner. He comes back around and gets back on track. Well, maybe this is a little shorter than going all the way around there. And what. What are they going to do to Earnhardt? Say, no, you can't. You got a little few feet. They don't want to worry about stuff like this. It's not fair to knock a guy out simply because he had a little trouble here or a little trouble there. Maybe he didn't go the distance, but he cost him some time. They just don't sweat it if somebody gets knocked in here and you cut off a corner every now and then over 5, 500 miles, they've got. Those are guidelines. It's generally going to work that way. But if it was a rule. Now, if NASCAR had. Was a rule, you could never go out out of bounds well, he'd be out and that wouldn't be fair. So that's why they work off guidelines in these situations. So as you set up things in your world don't have. The thing is the advantage of you having as few rules as possible is you could spend as little time as possible having to enforce the rules. And the way to think of rules to me is like a skeletal structure. You got to have enough kind of rules to keep the body upright. You know, like bones inside the body. You've got to have bones, but the mass of the body is going to be the muscles and tendons and all of that stuff. So you want to have as few bones just as the minimal skeletal structure. And that's your rules, the few things. Because, see, like if you, you know, you can ding a muscle or you know, tear a tendon or this, that the other and still function. You break a bone, you're shut down. You gotta, you know, you gotta heal that thing. So that's the way it is with rules. They cannot be, you know, they're rigid and if you go and test them, you'll break them. So you want to have as few rules as possible and more of the thing in the guideline category because that gives you flexibility. That keeps you from having to spend a whole lot of time enforcing them. So now let's take a look at the advantage. This is similar as follow up is the same thing, but it helps you. The easiest thing is to go in and have a lot of rules. But then you make a lot of rules and then you got to enforce them. So this goes another way of looking at this. Instead of rules, what a lot of people do, a lot of the more developed, civilized, enlightened leaders will have philosophies. See, the thing is, if you have a. People are different. So as soon as you have an organization, you have any kind of large number of people, it's the more rules you have. People have got to fit exactly in those boxes. Well, people don't fit in boxes. You know, people are all kind of shapes and sizes and you know, they don't, you know, you know, people are odd ducks. And you take this guy and try and put him in this rule and make sure he follows. Then he moves through and he's got to fit in this thing and he's got to move up here and then go there and you know, you're just asking for trouble. But because also the way human nature is, as soon as you have a rule, have you noticed everybody wants to argue with you about it everybody wants to know, okay, well we're not going to do it that way. So how can I work? Rules are a good way to activate people I want to work around. You know, they get the rebellious streak gets in there. Okay, that's a rule. But what if you don't do it like that? What can you get away with? Philosophies work different. Philosophies is you say we have, in other words, instead of saying we have a rule that everybody must obey, that's it, we say we have a philosophy. A philosophy. See in our world we believe that it's more profitable to do things this way and you get more out of it if you do this way. But we're not going to argue with you about it, we're not going to fight you about it. That's just what hey, we believe you're still stating what you know to be true, but you're doing it a non abrasive, non troublemaking, looking for a fight type manner. So it makes it. Have you noticed with people and probably yourself a lot of things the first time you hear about them you might say wrong, that's terrible. What idiot. I can't believe he said that. But the later you say, you know, like the teenager looking at the parents and saying I can't believe how dumb they are. And then 10 years later I can't believe how smart they are. See later you progress, you know more and you say wise. See if you have philosophies, you give people who don't really buy into your program a chance to work their way through and to come around. Whereas if you're over here and they go, you know, you're crazy now it might be the same thing you're talking to them about, but over here is a rule. They don't have time to work it out in their own mind. Try. They don't have time to try something else a little bit different or a lot different and then come around to your way of thinking. You're trying to force them into it and that's going to take your time. That's going to cause you to lose a lot of people. Here you give people a chance to work through it and once they come around and they work their way through experience, find out that why you believe that way. And also they're more open minded, you know, they're immediately closed minded if they don't agree with you. Here, here they're more open minded, say, well that's a great philosophy. I still think you're dumb because I believe do it the other way. And how many of us have changed our mind about key, critical things in our life? All of us. And see, if you're in an environment where things or principles are laid down as philosophies, you've got the room to work through that and not become an enemy or a black sheep or a problem maker while you're figuring out that the people who are, you know, running things actually know what they're talking about. So if I was telling you, I would say have as few of these as possible and as many of these as possible, because these give you more room to work, gives you more flexibility, and are going to give you much better results. All right?