Managing Leadership^®

The key to prioritizing is to understand that it doesn’t mean merely what to do first, or what to do in which order. It means what to do, and - just as importantly - what to ignore. The hardest part, and the one that actually requires the greatest and most ruthless discipline, is to be inactive where that is vital to advancing (or, more typically, to removing impediments to the advancement of) your organization toward its goals. These temptations come from both without and within.

Warren Buffet once remarked that CEOs must know when to be active - and when to resist the temptation to act. When everyone is doing M&A deals, downsizing, globalizing, process re-engineering, aggressively expanding their markets, or the like, maybe you should just take a look at your business model and, if you’re on track, stay there. Your obligations are to your shareholders and your business - not to the press or the consultants banging on your door. Your goal is to define what is good for your business and to execute it - not to let others make those determinations for you, and to simply slot in alongside all the other cows in the herd stampeding along, panicked to avoid missing the latest managerial fad.

But avoiding ill-disciplined activity within your organization is just as important. Discipline is defined as doing that which advances you toward accomplishment of your valid goals. Is your method of operating your business doing that? Take a look at your procedures and processes, your reporting requirements and your intra-organizational communications. Which are really necessary, and which really not? Which actually inform and advance organizational productivity, and which simply satisfy an ill-disciplined and ill-defined instinct for accumulation of irrelevant detail and imposition of pointless control? You are a manager. You are supposed establish procedures that facilitate and enable your employees to accomplish the goals you set for them. Are your procedures actually acting to harass and impede them, instead?

The competitive organization’s managerial culture is one that implicitly subjects every proposed activity to this sort of scrutiny - and not just by managers, but by employees also. Everyone should know what the organization’s goals are, and how what they are doing contributes to achieving them. If they don’t see this connection, they should be encouraged to question the tasking. Doing so will reinforce the goals, and either remove pointless activities or increase organizational energy directed at relevant ones. The competitive organization has the institutional discipline to be both smart and lazy. Does yours?

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Please be sure to see all the posts in this series:

1. Competitive Advantage: Keeping it simple
2. Competitive Advantage: Taking it easy
3. Competitive Advantage: the flip side of prioritizing

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• Competitive Advantage: Keeping it simple
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