Harvard Business School’s Tony Athos sometimes sat outdoors, “apparently staring off into space,” his colleague Jim Haskett recalls. “When asked what he was doing, ever the iconoclast, he would say, ‘Nothing.’ His colleagues, trained to admire and teach action, would walk away shaking their heads and asking each other, “Is he alright?”

In the spring of 2008, professor Haskett posed readers of HBS Working Knowledge with the question, “Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?”

Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s CEO, has received a lot of publicity recently for fostering “imagination breakthroughs” by encouraging managers to think deeply about innovations that will ensure GE’s longer-term success. He has vowed that he will protect those working on the breakthroughs from the “budget slashers” focused on short-term success. Questions that this effort raises include: (1) Why so much publicity? (2) Isn’t “deep thinking” what leaders are paid to do? and (3) Why do these kinds of effort require so much protection?

Then came Bernard Moon’s question, Can You Wait on God?, and I found myself thinking: “Wait on God! I’m lucky if my poor impulse control — masquerading as a positive bias for action — doesn’t drag me out the door without so much as a clear thought about how I might get where I might be going.”

It’s a discipline for me to sit down every morning with a blank page and write my thoughts (and prayers too) about what’s on my list, and what should be on my list, for the day. Thinking is hard work for me. And that’s not because I’m not good at it but because, like praying, if I really think about a thing, I may realize it needs more work. Or I may come up with a better idea and have to discard work I’ve already completed. Or I may not get what I want because I realize it’s not what I need. I hate not getting what I want.

But that’s not what business, nor life in general, is about, is it…

The biblical writer James puts his finger right on the bruise:

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
James 4:1-3

Ouch. Get out of my head.

There is a reason I seldom take early meetings; a reason I sit alone for a few minutes most mornings with my Rotring fountain pen and pray onto the pages of Moleskine notebook and think about what I’ve done and what I’m about to do: The reason is, I have nothing to lose by praying and thinking.

Thinking my way to the best idea I can imagine is better than being right at first blush.

Thinking to the conclusion that my initial idea was spot on is better than wondering later if I could have done better if I’d just given it a little more thought.

Asking what God wants to do and waiting (. . . . . .) till I believe I have an answer is better than deciding what I want to do and asking God to get behind it.

Because, if what I believe to understand about God is anywhere close to the actual state of things, I have nothing to lose by thinking deeply and trusting God. That doesn’t mean God never works through intuition (I think God does that). But I’ve seen more people lose their shirts on the impulse to grab first-mover advantage than to deliberately seeking wisdom.

Finishing his thought about Harvard’s Anthony Athos, who occasionally sat on a sunny bench doing “nothing,” Professor Haskett writes: “It is perhaps no coincidence that Tony often came up with some of the most profound insights at faculty meetings and informal gatherings.”

[Professor Haskett’s question — “Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?” — elicited 136 responses that may be worth scanning as you consider the climate where you work.]