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I was at lunch recently with a wealthy start-up founder guy in Stockholm, where there seems to be a ton of them. Smooth, successful, swathed in cashmere, socially adroit: he was sharing his top tip when it comes to hiring a new employee. After the interview, if they passed the first part, he would take them out to lunch. But if it took them more than a couple of minutes to order, he would give the job to someone else.
I wondered if there were caveats. For example: what if the candidate deferred to the waiter’s expertise and knowledge of the menu and then took his advice? This could show a lack of initiative, said the Swede, and an inability to make choices for oneself. However, he continued, he would be happy if the candidate were to copy the choice he had made himself.
I liked his logic. Why hire a timewaster when efficiency is all?
Western culture has come to venerate quick decision-making above almost all other skills. We have no patience for the cogitators, the “take-a-minutes” or the “sleep-on-it” types any more. People want an answer, and they want to hear it now. There’s little appetite for dialogue or coming to a decision having considered all the factors it entails.
Our collective impetuosity must be a feature of our soundbite culture and, of course, social media feeds: everything has to be summed up in witty aphorisms and squeezed into ever shorter sentences before being swiped away. In a world of infinite choices, decision-making has become a superpower. Alongside it, an odd culture has built around the flex of staying streamlined and focused. We lurved Obama’s blue shirts and Mark Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirts because their uniforms signalled that their minds were never distracted from the daily work of being great.
As one of the least patient people on the planet, I have great sympathies with this view. I can’t stand ditherers, or people who want to question things ad infinitum with their tedious fact checks and counterpoints. I don’t want to argumenter about things for hours, as the French are wont to do.
Perhaps it’s a northern European thing to admire those who make decisions with ruthless efficiency. In southern Europe, there still seems an appetite for contemplation and dialogue. (The basis for this assertion, you’ll be impressed to know, comes from a field study I conducted while on a series of recent trips: just watch the 15-minute drama that accompanies an Italian trying to buy a tomato and you’ll know exactly what I mean. Latin people squeeze and sniff the product, and discuss, endlessly, its provenance. They talk about what might taste nice alongside it and what to eat after, whereas my exchanges in the UK usually find some exasperated grocer sullenly chucking unseen fruit into a paper bag.)
Cogitation, contemplation and thoughtfulness are no longer cool. Just look at the recent election debates on UK television, in which candidates have been expected to deliver complex strategy in quick-fire, 40-second gasps.
I have always prided myself on my rapid thinking and clarity of thought. I rarely dawdle in my decision-making. Feminists might argue that has a historic precedent: women, once overlooked in the decision-making process, have learnt to sandwich their opinions, like lean slices of juicy filler, in between the doughy blather of the boys. However, I was stopped short while reading Rory Stewart’s completely depressing memoir Politics on the Edge, in which the one-time Tory minister laments the coarsening of dialogue in government and — by extension — thought. He saves a special savagery for the former foreign secretary, days-long prime minister and his former boss, Liz Truss. “Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity,” he writes. “Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not.” Eurgh. Am I Liz Truss?
Stewart is a man who loves a lengthy rumination, so much so that he goes on silent retreats just to sit still with all these thoughts. His position is one in which we should luxuriate in all the details, and where weakness should not be confused with doubt.
Making political decisions is not comparable to choosing a tomato, or deciding what you want for lunch. But it does all point to the lack of patience now endemic in some professional and business quarters.
So, how do you make your lunch order? Do you always choose the same? Do you hover over different dishes and then order something that you hate? Given the choice, I would never order. I would allow someone else to make the choice. Who has time to read a menu? I would simply defer the decision to the Swede and then see if I, in fact, wanted to work with him. Ha! How the table turns.
jo.ellison@ft.com
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