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Even the best of companies have trouble with managers who make decisions in a vacuum. "When I was at IBM," says John Spielberger, president of Information Technology Services Inc., based in Hauppauge, N.Y., "I saw top management make a lot of bad decisions because they didn't know all the company's systems and how they would be affected by the plans." To keep that from happening at his own company, Spielberger has instituted a procedure to make sure that managers run decisions by their peers and subordinates before moving ahead. He calls it a sanity check.

The idea is simple enough: once someone has reasoned out a decision, he or she goes over the plan with other managers and employees, closing with the line "Am I crazy?" That's the signal for the others to sound off about possible adverse effects he may have overlooked. By making the practice standard operating procedure, the company has spared itself a lot of grief, he says. Spielberger himself was dissuaded from opening an office in Washington, D.C., this year. In another instance, a data processor was saved from setting up a computer system with incompatible elements.

"There's a sanity check here at least once a day," says Spielberger. "It's just a way to ensure that we've covered the bases."