Stop reading books.

I’ve worked with several CEO’s in the past who read a lot of books on every business topic you could imagine, particularly when they were facing challenging times in their organization. Some would subtly even brag about the sheer number they were able to get through in a year. For a long time, I took this as a sign that they wanted to find the best way to navigate through what was, to them, uncharted territory and perhaps learn from those with more or different experience. Over the years, though, I’ve learned just how unproductive this can be.

Intentions don’t mean much without action, and learning only has value when you put into practice what you now know. In other words - books are great, but execution is better. If your company is failing and you read 50 books last year, I would argue that reading isn’t helping and that you should perhaps try another strategy to get your house in order.

I worked with one CEO who had several fires in his company. Not small fires, big fires. Everywhere. Fires you shouldn’t make s’mores over but fires you should call the fire department for. He knew he needed help and would continuously read book after book after book, and then tell me to read the same book so we could then talk about that book a week later. To be fair, the content was great! It had a lot of fantastic suggestions that the company could really benefit from and this CEO said he wanted to implement the strategies he learned. After trying to execute on some of those suggestions, he resisted. Another book was sent to me a few weeks later. 

Measure your productivity not by how much knowledge you’ve absorbed, but by the action you take with the knowledge you gain.