Each month, a woman who owns a little coffee shop allows local artists to hang their works in her business. It's a very busy café, so the artists get a lot of exposure. But every time a new artist is offered the space, he or she bombards the owner with a long list of questions and concerns about the hanging process. Eventually, she has to tell the anxious artist, "Just show up with your pictures and a hammer. We have ladders. If you don't think too much, it will all come together just fine."

"Analysis paralysis" hobbles giant corporations and sole proprietors alike, so I like the café owner's advice to not think too much. Instead, she wants people to think about the right things.  In a way, this fulfills management's primary responsibility to remove obstacles for coworkers. Thinking about the right things reduces distracting anxieties and lets her coworkers - and guest artists - think clearly and, more importantly, take immediate action.

The café owner has the benefit of experience. She knows the most important thing is just to get the work hanging so customers can see it. If artists agonize over placement and balance and how to hang and what to show, it only slows progress and turns an opportunity into an ordeal. Leaders remove over-analysis obstacles by giving clear direction for the task at hand: She tells them they need a hammer, not a committee meeting.

Way back in the 1980s, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman went In Search of Excellence and identified "a bias for action" as one of the traits of excellent companies. In the same decade, Al Ries and Jack Trout studied Positioning, and concluded that it's better to be first than to be best. Recently, Arianna Huffington and her team at Huffingtonpost.com published a book of best practices for bloggers. One of their top recommendations was to not over-think your piece; just get something out on a regular basis. All of these remind me of Theodore Roosevelt's advice: "In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing."

I treasure the imagination and creativity of coworkers, but I want those talents directed toward the creation of systems that simplify processes and improve productivity. At Kinko's, we had a factory, retail store and management offices under one roof. We constantly refined production systems because we wanted machine operators to think about quality, not process. We simplified actions so our minds were free for more important work. A good business leader thinks hard about how to think less.