The acronym “ASAP” means “as soon as possible.”   Most people probably know the literal translation.  But in terms of what people want you to do when they say they want something “ASAP” is a different story.  That’s a big ol’ canna worms.

People toss ASAP around all the time in the business world without thinking through what they mean.  It’s designed to make you move faster and get projects done yesterday rather than tomorrow.  I think people even believe it motivates you because it implies urgency.  “We need to get this done right away, McGillicutty, because if we don’t, the company fails.”

This is not true 99.99% of the time.  Companies don’t fail based on one deadline or piece of information or a delayed report.   They fail because of poor performance, not understanding and responding to their customers or not updating what they are doing to reflect recent technological trends.

None of those failures have anything to do with ASAP.  When things get messed up it’s more about poor business sense.

In fact, the term ASAP is likely counterproductive.  When you say it to someone, s/he rushes.  Employees overlook things, they don’t review materials the way they should, and this ultimately leads to errors.  Safety mistakes occur most frequently when we rush.  ASAP urges us to rush.

I worked with a guy 15 years ago or so who loved the term, and putting the red exclamation (!) point on his emails to signify importance.  In reality, what he was trying to do was signify his own importance.  Because he felt all his work was the most important in our unit, he had to make sure we all knew this, too.

What did we do?  We ignored him.  Almost down to a person, we remarked on the urgent exclamation point and chose to not respond with speed.  We put him on the back burner and made him wait.

That’s because his syndrome is so similar to crying wolf.   Keep pretending everything is a crisis and after a bit everyone knows what you send out is not a crisis.  In fact, it might be useless information.  Or, information that needs to be more thoroughly analyzed and dissected before it actually provides value.

That takes time and thought.  In those situations, it is better to do the job correctly, with contemplation involved.

When ASAP is thrown your way, do you ask when the report is due?  That one question would solve a lot of business problems and reduce stress.

You need a concrete deadline, not ASAP, to do good work.  You need to know the deadline, why it is important, where the information/product/service is going and why. 

“I need this ASAP,” can be changed to, “We’ve got some important customer deals we need to finish by the end of this week. It would help greatly if you could get that data analyzed by Thursday afternoon, so I have some time to edit it. That will make sure we put our best foot forward.”

That gives you rationale, timing and motivation to give the job the intensity required.  So get on it.

We’re on a speed train in business these days, and in many ways it’s about to wreck rational and logical thought.  Embracing rapid-fire thinking and decision-making is necessary at times, but when it becomes ASAP all the time, there is something fundamentally wrong.

Next time you get the ASAP chant, pose a questions to figure out its real importance, “When do you need this?  Do anyone else need to review this?  Is there anything else I need to know?”  Everyone will feel much better with the result because the job will get done with the diligence and focus necessary.

The following can happen if you use social media, particularly Twitter and Instagram:  It’s easy to latch onto a trend or begin clicking on people to follow who focus on some obscure piece of information.  In particular, since photos catch your eye, and both these platforms capture pictures, you can find yourself scrolling through photo after photo to the point of saturation.

Our world is becoming increasingly visual and less word-oriented.  It would be hard to argue against that statement.  Any newspaper editor would agree with it; in fact almost anyone who works in the field of written communications would agree.  We read less and less.  We look at more “things,” with “things” being photos, videos, charts, graphs, and short quotes or statements.

In focusing on shorter phrases and visual imagery, we also then have the ability to look at more.  We scan, we summarize, we shorten.  Then we do it again.

By continuing to visit certain sites or follow specific people, issues, companies, celebrities, causes or leaders, we open ourselves to the continuity of those specific sites.  If you’re on Twitter, for example, if you follow someone, you go to their feed and tap away, looking at what that person has to say in sound bites or coded notes to friends and fans. 

What you don’t get is lengthy analysis.  Instead, you often get repetition.   If you seek this out, then you keep going back to their feed.  If not, there are thousands of other places you can electronically visit.

Over the past four years, in developing a slight affinity for social media, I’ve found myself attracted to certain sites, causes and individuals.  Most are funny or provide spectacular photographic imagery.

What I never expected though was to become addicted to elephants.  Let me explain.

Elephants are intelligent, elegant, regal and fascinating.  Think about how big they are.  Then there is the thickness of their skin and how that has developed over the  years.  Their ears are monuments to the piece of the anatomy.

And then we get to the nose – the incredibly elongated nostrils and their ability to work like vacuum cleaners.  If you’ve fed elephants peanuts at a zoo, circus or if you are lucky, on some form of trip into the wild, you know the weird sensation when they suck it off the palm of your hand.  It is almost like they are tasting you at the moment, savoring who you are.

But it’s not those live incidents that have created my elephant addiction.  Instead, it’s seeing pictures of them on Twitter or Instagram in their infancy, the goofy things they do, how they hang out in packs, the way the adults protect them, their demonstrated intelligence.  There is also the extremely sad issue of elephant hunting, which gets trumpeted on Twitter, that further grabs my attention.

As the number of elephants dwindles around the globe, we are all diminished.  This is where the ability of social media platforms to magnify messages becomes so valuable and visible.  As elephant hunting and outright slaughter occurs, there are multiple concerned individuals sharing photos of the carnage and pushing the cause of protection and conservation of habitat.

So many animals have been put on this planet with us to be part of the ecosystem.  If we lose elephants, we lose the ability to learn from them to create something larger for ourselves based on having creatures that are different but show us ways to live within limits.

We should watch and listen to the elephants.  Observe their behavior and learn from them.

If we did that instead of shooting them, the world would be a better place.

The best auto maintenance is no auto maintenance.  You buy a car and it runs perfectly until you sell it nine years later.   It would be nice if we all could be so lucky.

Given that only the super rich can now buy a new car, the rest of us are stuck with used car options or we purchase a cheapie.  Either way, we know the vehicle is not going to make it without breaking down at some inopportune point.

So you have to figure in auto maintenance.   You know walking in the auto repair shop door, it’s S75 before you even open your mouth, and $75 for every hour after that to get the technician to tell you what is going on in a language that requires an interpreter. 

If you can leave for under 500 bucks, you should probably consider yourself lucky.  So auto maintenance lesson #1 is to run your car forever.

I have several friends who subscribe to this theory and have been relatively successful at bucking the trend that says you need to regularly change the oil, oil filter, air filter and other components that keep the car tuned up.  His remarkable goal is to instead not do any of that:  Drive the car until you kill it.

This was first demonstrated to me back when we got out of college.  Four of us decided to drive from Illinois to Minnesota to do some skiing.  We took his car, one he’d just bought.  It was a small import, if I remember correctly, and we were extremely cramped for the 9 hour trip, but we all fit it, and it got great gas mileage.

He kept that vehicle for many years, eventually moving to Denver, at some point.  I’m not sure where he was when he finally got rid of it, but what I do remember is him laughing and talking about how he drove it 67,000 miles and never took it into the shop.  This is back in the late 1970s-early 1980s, so cars weren’t designed to last as long as they are today.  That made his mechanic-less journey even more remarkable.

No oil changes, no replacing the spark plugs, no new gas filter, belts or hoses, and I’m not even sure he changed the tires, though it would seem impossible in looking back that tires could last that long.  So he probably did replace them. 

That car was the beginning of “my style of auto maintenance,” he explains.  “I have developed an ability to properly drive and maintain cars.  Many of you might not be aware, and this is of no fault of your own because you are so quick to notice my more obvious talents, that I have driven four vehicles in excess of 300,000 miles,” he wrote to several of us friends recently.

“This includes the truck I presently drive that has an odometer reading 366,240 miles.  Little did the lucky few realize at the time that I was researching automobile engine and transmission dynamics.”

“For the record, that first car of mine was a ’78 Dodge Challenger imported from Japan.  It cost $5,129.00.  I was lucky enough at the time to have paid cash for it, and when I gave it to my younger brother-in-law, the odometer read 302,333 miles.”

So I guess he surpassed the 67,000 miles I thought he’d driven.  Which goes to show you that you can drive a car into the ground.  Just keep piling on the miles, avoid the auto mechanic.  Fill it with gas, and drive on.  Maybe he’ll get lucky some day and hit 400,000 miles.

Do you ever wonder how you’d lead your daily life if electronic communications suddenly evaporated?  If you are under the age of 30, you probably can’t even conceive of that because you know no other world.  But if you’re older than that, particularly in your 40’s or beyond, you can hark back to the days where people conversed face-to-face, returned phone calls after their secretaries held messages for them while they were out of the office, and your mail piled up in your in-box when you were on vacation.

Years ago, when I was a journalist in Washington, D.C., we had a useful system for when the staff went on vacation.  We got a substitute to do our jobs.  That individual covered our beat, wrote the stories, did some editing, interviewing and writing.

It wasn’t perfect.  We prepped them beforehand, walked them around to meet people, and gave them a lengthy note on the important stuff to cover.  We could then clap our hands together, dust them off, and head off to whatever journey we had planned to get away from the work world and relax.

Since that time, the intensity of “keeping up” has risen at almost an exponential rate, kicking into high gear with email and widespread use of the Internet, followed by cell phones, smart phones and wireless access to information just about anywhere in the world.  The expected reality is now to stay connected rather than disconnect and relax when you go on vacation.

This syndrome is not just experienced when you take time off and realize you are checking emails, voice mails and your smart phone for what is going on back in the office.   It is experienced when you are home with your kids as they surf their phones while you are trying to watch a television show together.  It is in the car, when you want to talk and hear about their day, and they are scanning through songs to put on their iPad so they can put in their ear plugs and tune-out.

When you watch these types of activities day after day, week after week, month after month, you begin to wonder what everyone would do if electronic communications suddenly went away. Recently, I had an overseas business trip, which to me is always a chance to read.

I brought two long novels with me.  I finished one on the flight over, another while I was at the hotel and had to buy two more at the hotel airport for the flight back, and finished one of those and started the fourth.  Each of the books was 300-400 pages long.

The solitude let me engage in the novels over an extended period of time.  I thought about the plots, characters, themes and the writing itself, contemplating the joy of the author’s ability to string together phrases that made me pause and chuckle.  How often do you do this today?

If communications went out, we’d read more, play board games, converse, play cards, read and get to know our neighbors.  We’d rely more on each other for information and what is going on in our local community. 

We use smart phones to kill boredom.  Memorial Day weekend, I disconnected, did yard work, read, napped and spent time talking with my family.  It felt super.

We can’t get completely away.  But we can carve our days around the technologies that so relentlessly seek our attention and drive us to distraction.

Get the book out.  Find a comfortable spot to lie down.   Turn off your smart phone.  Start focusing on the pages.  You may nod off.  That’s good.  When you wake up, you’ll be refreshed and ready to read some more.

There’s this mantra you hear over and over in the marketing world about finding brand evangelists for your product, service or company.  “Look for those people who are passionate about what you do and get them to promote your brand.”

This is all well in and good if, 1) you can find people like this, 2) they are willing to speak up for you, and 3) if what they say resonates with another human being.  If you can’t get all three of those factors in the package, it’s incomplete.

Recently I was invited to a Chamber of Commerce event.   It brought together officials from three high level companies -- a major auto dealership, a paper company and Southwest Airlines.  They had some fascinating things to say about how to promote your company, some counter-intuitive and refreshing and some mind-numbingly self-evident.

To clear out the boring stuff early, all of them said your employees are your biggest brand ambassadors.  If they don’t love what they do, and spout to others, you’re never going to get additional customers.

Think about how simple this principle is:  If people like working where they are, they smile, engage, laugh, deal with others in a happy way. If they don’t, they complain, scowl, argue and generally treat customers like cockroaches.

All three of the people on the panel hammered home the point that it wasn’t senior management that made the company go round, but the people in the trenches.  “Hire the right people.”

What distinguished these three companies were some other tidbits they shared during the panel discussion.  For example, if you ask around, it’s hard to find any place that would hire another member of your family.  They might hire a friend of yours if you gave a scintillating endorsement.

In contrast with that perspective, all three of the officials at the Chamber event said they were pro-Nepotism (love that phrase).  “If you have a good hire, find other friends or other members of that family and hire them, too,” was the consensus.


That’s refreshing.  It’s also smart.  If you have good people, find out where they come from, what molded them, who raised them, who they hang out with, and see if you can find others like them.

It’s the steamroller effect.  If you get one person, they’ll spread the message to their buddies, and hopefully you’ll get more applicants of the same stripe.

It’s puzzling that more companies don’t do this.  It’s not complicated.  It’s logical.  Yet repeatedly you find companies who feel that hiring two brothers or a father and daughter would be bad for business.  Have they ever thought it might be the exact opposite and be tremendous for business?

Here’s another tip they had:  Take a potential new hire out to lunch and see how s/he treats the wait staff.  All the panelists agreed on this one.

What’s the point?  1) People let down their guard and act more naturally while eating a meal.  2) How someone treats a wait person shows a lot about how they will treat others.  You get a quick look at customer service skills.

People who like where they work want to stay there, and they also want their friends to join them.  Every piece of research written on work environments backs the point that if you have good friends at work, it’s a motivating factor in your happiness.

Happy employees are good employees. They go the extra mile for you. They take on extra duties.  They make constructive suggestions.  Every business can use that.

Find your best people, then end your anti-nepotism policy, and hire their friends and relatives.