"Subtract first, then multiply"

I've talked about the Eisenhower Matrix, which was first described by the author Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) in a previous post ("What is important is seldom urgent...").  The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool to help individuals prioritize tasks in order to maximize their productivity and goal achievement.  It's based upon a comment made by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States and former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, who famously once said, "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.  The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."  

Prioritizing is an important skill for leaders.  Here is what a few other noted management thinkers have said about prioritizing:

Warren Buffet: "The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say 'no' to almost everything."

Steve Jobs: "Focusing is about saying no."

Peter Drucker: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

Brian Tracy: "Think on paper. Only about 3% of adults have clear, written goals. These people accomplish five to ten times as much as people without written goals."

Jim Collins: "If you have more than three priorities, you don't have any."

The last quote is notable, because it suggests that the number of priorities we should have at any given time can be measured in single digits!  What's true for individuals is, as it turns out, also true for organizations!  Bryant University Business School Professor Michael Roberto recently wrote a blog post in which he suggested that organizations should have less than five priorities (see "Five priorities is probably too many").  He references an article in Forbes magazine by Willie Pietersen, retired CEO of businesses Lever Foods, Seagram USA, and Tropicana entitled, "You can't have 5 priorities - even Steve Jobs and Bob Iger couldn't".  Pietersen writes that in the history of business, one thing is both universally true and abundantly clear: "Focus energizes, while complexity paralyzes."  

During Pietersen's 20 years as CEO of various organizations, he followed this mantra by limiting the number of priorities within his organization to five and asked each business unit within the organization to follow suit.  Even with this level of discipline though, he encountered problems.  He writes, "At progress review meetings I saw that executives were often trudging through these priorities mechanically like a checklist, without connecting them to a central strategic thrust or inspiring story." In response, he changed his approach slightly.  He continued to identify five priorities for the organization, but his team would next simplify these priorities into a few key drivers that would help them achieve the organization's priorities - this list of drivers seldom exceeded three.

Not surprisingly, Pietersen's approach is consistent with the available research in the fields of neuroscience and management theory.  Neuroscience researcher Nelson Cowan finds that people generally can only keep about four things in their so-called "working memory" at once.  Management researchers Donald Sull, Charles Sull, and James Yoder surveyed 132 senior executives and middle managers at a U.S.-based technology company with over 10,000 employees.  The CEO at the company was confident that the management team were 100% aligned on the company's five strategic priorities, which had in fact not changed in two years and were regularly communicated in a variety of venues.  Only one-quarter of the managers surveyed could list three of the company's five strategic priorities, and one-third could not list even one!  These results are, unfortunately, fairly typical.  In a follow-up survey involving 124 organizations, these investigators found that only 51% of C-suite leaders could list three of their company’s strategic priorities!  Alignment drops off precipitously beyond the C-suite, with 22%, 18%, and 13% of senior leaders, middle managers, and front-line supervisors able to list their company's top priorities, respectively.  

Anecdotally, both Steve Jobs and Bob Iger achieved unprecedented success at Apple and Disney, respectively, by focusing on 3-5 strategic priorities at any one time.  Jobs co-founded Apple and was forced out as CEO in 1985.  Following his departure, the company added a large and diverse variety of products and services under different CEO's, and by 1996 Apple was on the verge of collapse.  Jobs returned in 1997 and reduced Apple's product line by 70% and focused on just four key products.  He famously would end each year's annual retreat by challenging his top executives to identify 10 things that the company should do next.  He would next delete seven, saying "We can only do three."

Similarly, before Bob Iger was appointed as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, the board had asked him to define his strategic priorities for the company.  He started to make a list, and when he got to five, he quickly realized, "I hadn't prioritized any of them" and "My overall vision lacked clarity and inspiration."  He subsequently narrowed his list of priorities to three (content, technology, and globalization), and during his tenure (first stint) as CEO from 2005 to 2020, the company increased their market capitalization from $48 billion to $257 billion.  

Pietersen ends his article by stating, "Brain science dictates the rules of human performance.  To galvanize the limited attention of employees on the three or four priorities that matter most, the formula for success is: Subtract first, then multiply."