I once worked with an executive team that needed help with their prioritization. They were struggling to identify the top five projects they wanted their IT department to complete over the next fiscal year, and one of the managers was having a particularly hard time with it. She insisted on naming eighteen "top priority" projects. I insisted that she choose five. She took her list back to her team, and two weeks later they returned with a list she had managed to shorten - by one single project! (I always wondered what it was about that one lone project that didn't make the cut.) By refusing to make trade-offs, she ended up spreading five projects' worth of time and effort across seventeen projects. Unsurprisingly, she did not get the results she wanted. Her logic had been: We can do it all. Obviously not.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.54, 55
No comments:
Post a Comment