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Only worry about doing them right once you’re certain they’re the right things
We often optimize for efficiency and excellence in execution—“doing things right”—while losing sight of whether we’re doing the right things at all. Teams will perfectly execute the wrong priorities. We build “flawless” products that have no market. We’ll meticulously follow processes—or hold people to processes—that seem important but create no value. The pressure to demonstrate competence and progress overrides the real question: Are we doing the things that matter? (And how do we know that’s the case?)
This is hard enough for an individual human, where aspirations of productivity are mixed with varying attitudes, attention spans, and abilities. Knowing whether every one of the thousands of people in a large organization is, in fact, spending their time in the best possible way at any given moment gets exponentially more difficult as organizations scale. Layers of metrics, objectives, and incentives can obscure the ultimate impact of work, to say nothing for the structural impact of hierarchy on information quality.
Knowing is hard enough. Deciding is often much more challenging. Boston Consulting Group’s Your Strategy Needs a Strategy shows there isn’t a one-size-fits-all direction: Environments can be classical, adaptive, visionary, shaping, or in renewal, and each calls for a different playbook.