Business Insight Zone

Set aside your To-Do List and make a STOP-Doing List.

That’s a piece of wisdom that’s been hitting me from all angles lately:

• Matthew E. May wrote about this, first while talking about Jim Collins and Toyota, then, even more simply, while discussing Apple. Key takeaway: “What is it that our competitors would struggle with if we were to cease?”
• Leo Babauta of Zen Habits focuses on (semi-mystical) personal fulfillment, not business management, but I think he’s onto something with posts like “The Lazy Manifesto: Do Less. Then, Do Even Less” and “Pare It Down: Cut Away the Extraneous to Leave the Awesome.” Key takeaway: “This doesn’t mean ‘less is more’. It means ‘less is better’.”
• “Necessary but Insufficient,” a blog post at Shmula that I discovered via Matthew May, talks about “The Art of Exclusion” as it hasn’t been followed by Motorola. Key takeaway, citing Michael Porter: “Porter then claims that an important aspect of strategy is deciding what NOT to do — the art of exclusion.”

My own cross to bear

No doubt I focus on this idea because it’s a struggle for me personally: besides writing this blog, I represent Hoover’s across other social-media outlets, fulfill other Hoover’s duties, try to work ahead toward my Ph.D., field outside projects, spend time with my family, and be a resource for my friends (especially those who are looking for work).

But my overbooked-ness hardly stands out as unusual when I look around at my colleagues and friends. For many people I know, it has become standard operating procedure to

• (a) do too much,
• (b) attempt still more,
• (c) become overwhelmed,
• (d) experience semi-success — at best — in any one endeavor, and
• (e) wonder why all the time and energy they’re spending isn’t stacking up to success.

Individuals = Companies

The lesson seems to generalize pretty well to companies that bite off more than they can chew, too. Vikram Pandit and his team are busy unraveling the overgrown Citigroup that Sandy Weill built and that Chuck Prince worked so hard to preserve. It remains to be seen whether no bank can succeed across so many lines of business, or if it was just the fault of too-rapid expansion and faulty integration for Citi.

A few years ago, Intel got itself in trouble when it expanded too far beyond its core strategy of making great microchips. Appropriately, its leaders had the good sense to stop making microscopes and the like; twenty-plus years ago, Intel became the poster-child for stopping a strategic-loser line of business when Andy Grove took it out of the memory-chip business and bet heavily on microprocessors.

I’m sure there are other examples — which ones come to mind for you?

Time to get real

It’s easy to say “Oh, sure, I should definitely cut down on my obligations.” It’s much harder to actually DO that — to go through the list, single out the lesser goals / projects / tasks, and then just drop them unceremoniously. Even harder, from my experience anyway, is to stop engaging in “workiness”. The only antidote I’ve found is to pull back, make hard decisions about what’s really important, and then go after only that. But the hard effort is worth it.

Join me, won’t you?

What are YOU willing to stop doing so that you can have more success?
What should your COMPANY stop doing?

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Related:

• Banish “busy”!
• Productivity tip: Parse ruthlessly.
• Productivity tip: Throw away something on your To-Do list.

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Photo by Aldo Gonzalez, used under a Creative Commons license.

Category: Management