Why does Corporate America take forever to make decisions?

Why does the country that took four years to win World War II need six years to design a button?

Facebook says it’s giving us a Don’t Like button. Maybe.

Facebook introduced the Like button six years ago. It was an instant hit. It was convenient — a quick way to let your friends and family know you’ve seen and like what they’ve posted.

The Like button has been great, though hardly innovative. The concept has been around since the days of the Roman Coliseum. We stick our thumbs up to show we like or approve of something. Somewhat less often, we use a thumbs-down gesture to say something sucks.

Which brings us to what’s been missing from the Facebook sharing experience. Because the Like button isn’t appropriate for all posts. Not all life events are happy ones. You can’t always click the Like button if a friend announces something unfortunate. Say he’s had a fender bender or, God forbid, his goldfish dies. A Don’t Like button, in whatever shape or form it’s rendered, would work for that. A quick way to show that you sympathize or empathize or whatever.

Now six years after we first asked for a don’t like option, Facebook is about to give us one. What took them so long? OK, so we shouldn’t single out Facebook. Lots of companies agonize over their decisions in exactly the same way.

Some people can come to rocklike conclusions based on a couple of salient facts. Like the late Stuart Symington, a corporate turnaround artist before he entered politics.

“A businessman doesn’t have to know too many details about his business,” Symington said. “I knew a man who ran a chain of hotels. He used to take weeks off in the Canadian woods. An Indian guide went up the river every day with one figure that was cabled to him. It was the number of potatoes served every day in the main dining rooms of his hotels. My friend could decide from that figure how he was doing that day. If you’re really experienced, you know exactly which are the two or three things you need to know.”*

A dash of daring might help. Steve Jobs staked his reputation on the Power Mac G4 Cube. But he didn’t slash his wrists when the Cube didn’t sell as well as he’d hoped. He just yanked it off the market. With characteristic aplomb, Mr. Jobs even wrote its obituary. “Apple puts Power Mac G4 Cube on ice,” his headline read.

It wasn’t just his aesthetic sense that made Steve Jobs successful. He had nerve.

That chutzpah was part of the Apple brand. He’d swung for the fences and come up short, but so what? Nobody bats a thousand.

Research hasn’t helped today’s decision makers. In fact, access to overwhelming amounts of data seems to induce a kind of paralysis.

Customer feedback doesn’t help, either. For example, consumers griped about clothing labels for decades. They hated labels that tickled and scratched and made their clothes uncomfortable. Companies say they listen to customers, but the garment industry was hearing impaired. People had to use scissors to remove labels that bothered them.

Then one manufacturer had the guts to sell a t-shirt with a tagless label printed on the fabric itself. The tagless feature caused a shopping stampede.

Think of the millions of hours squandered in meetings about inconsequential things. Is this necessary? What made Corporate America so timid?

* Flora Lewis, “The Education of a Senator,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1971, p.56.