From Chip Heath’s book “Decisive”
Enshrine your core priorities.
“By identifying and enshrining your core priorities, you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas.”
Examples:
- “Ramirez continued to agonize about the decision until, eventually, she realized why she was stuck: It wasn’t just a job decision; it was a values decision. Growing up, she’d always viewed herself as an “ambitious career woman,” and from that perspective, the start-up role was a no-brainer. It offered more responsibility and more growth. She’d be able to put her stamp on the place. On the other hand, as she’d gained experience in her career, she’d come to value balance in her life: time with Josh, time with friends, time with family.”
- “it suddenly hit her. A question. What do I work for? What’s the purpose of it? The thought hit her like a lightning bolt. “I almost fell off the treadmill,” she said. The thoughts came tumbling out: I work to make enough money to be secure, to travel with Josh, to take a photo class if I want, or to take my sister out for dinner. But if I don’t have enough time to do these things that I love, it won’t matter that I have more money or responsibility. It became crystal clear to her: She needed to stick with her current job. “I felt at peace about it,” she said.”
- “Now we’ll turn our attention to dilemmas like Ramirez’s, in which you find yourself torn between two options, both of which have long-term appeal. An agonizing decision like hers is often a sign of a conflict among “core priorities.” We’re using the word “core” to capture the sense of long-term emotion we’ve been discussing; these are priorities that transcend the week or the quarter. For individuals that means long-term goals and aspirations, and for organizations it means the values and capabilities that ensure the long-term health of the enterprise.”
- “Once the leaders of Interplast realized that the patient, rather than the surgeon, was their top priority, they did something important: They enshrined that priority, making it known to everyone in the organization, so that it could influence dozens or even hundreds of future decisions.”
- “That’s why it’s so important to enshrine core priorities, not just cheerlead for generic values. Even the cash-register guy at Hot Dog on a Stick will routinely encounter conflicts among priorities. If a customer drops a corn dog, should he offer a free replacement? (Is his top duty to ensure that the customer is satisfied or that the owner is profitable?) Without clear priorities to draw on, the decision will be made idiosyncratically, depending on the employee’s mood at the moment. While we can probably tolerate some randomness when it comes to fumbled hot dogs, alignment is critical in many other situations.”
- “Parents experience this too: Quality time with your kids gets pushed out by last-minute errands and meal preparations. The problem is that urgencies—the most vivid and immediate circumstances—will always hog our spotlight.“
- “Roberts craved a list of simple principles that could serve as guardrails for handling those dilemmas. He sought, as he put it, “guardrails that are wide enough to empower but narrow enough to guide.” So he formulated a list of guiding principles that we will call Wayne’s Rules. One of the rules was “Have a bias for action: Do first, apologize later.” (p. 157)
- “This is one of the classic tensions of management: You want to encourage people to use their judgment, but you also need your team members’ judgments to be correct and consistent. So Roberts began to study his team’s most common predicaments, in order to understand what kind of guidance to provide. He found that his consultants struggled with dilemmas like these: Should they agree informally to a small change in scope or wait for headquarters to approve it? Could they approve a $1,000 purchase on their own, or should they seek permission?” (p. 157)
Why don’t people enshrine their core priorities?
- “First, people rarely establish their priorities until they’re forced to. Kim Ramirez didn’t decide hers until she confronted a job choice. Interplast had never resolved the tension in its mission statement until two values came directly into opposition.”
- “Our calendars are the ultimate scoreboard for our priorities. If forensic analysts confiscated your calendar and e-mail records and Web browsing history for the past six months, what would they conclude are your core priorities?” (p. 158)
- “To spend more time on our core priorities (which, surely, is our goal!) necessarily means spending less time on other things. That’s why Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, suggests that we create a “stop-doing list.”
- “What sparked the idea was a challenge from one of his advisers to consider what he would do if he received two life-changing phone calls. In the first call, he’d learn that he’d inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second call would inform him that, due to a rare and incurable disease, he had only 10 years left to live. The adviser asked Collins, “What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?” Since that time, Collins said, he has prepared a “stop-doing” list every year.”
- “It’s tempting but naive to pretend that we can make time for everything by multitasking or by working more efficiently. But face it, there’s not that much slack in your schedule. An hour spent on one thing is an hour not spent on another. So if you’ve made a resolution to spend more time with your kids, or to take a college class, or to exercise more, then part of that resolution must be to decide what you’re going to stop doing. Make it concrete: Look back over your schedule for the past week and ask yourself, What, specifically, would I have given up to carve out the extra three or four or five hours that I’ll need?” (p. 159)
- “Every day,all of us struggle to stay off List B and get back to List A. It’s not easy. Remember that MIT study showing that, over the course of a week, managers spent no time whatsoever on their core priorities? Peter Bregman, a productivity guru and blogger for the Harvard Business Review, recommends a simple trick for dodging this fate. He advises us to set a timer that goes off once every hour, and when it beeps, we should ask ourselves, “Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?” (p. 160)