Business Insight Zone

My advice for the moment

Read this item by Matthew May:

The “Stop-Doing” Project Abandonment Strategy

. . . What all of these individuals share is the subtractive mindset and a belief in the power and discipline of a “stop-doing” project abandonment strategy. In the throes of his early post-Stanford Business School career at Hewlett-Packard, Collins’ favorite former professor reproached him for a lack of discipline. An expert in creativity and innovation, she told him his hard-wired energy level was riding over his mental clarity, enabling a busy yet unfocused life. Her words rang true; at the time, Collins was aggressively chasing his carefully-set stretch goals for the year, confident in his ability to accomplish them. Still, his life was crowded with the commotion of a fast-tracking career. Her comment made him pull up short and re-examine what he was doing. To help, she did what great teachers do, constructing a lesson in the form of an assignment she called “20-10”: Imagine that you’ve just inherited $20 million free and clear, but you only have 10 years to live. What would you do differently—and specifically, what would you stop doing? How would you practice project abandonment? . . .

I’ve gotten to know Matt slightly online, and have been enjoying his blog since I discovered it a couple of months ago. The fact that he’s talking about Peter Drucker and Jim Collins in this article, plus harping on the theme of improvement-by-subtraction, is icing on the cake.

This weekend has already been a good one for me for abandoning cruft. It follows on the heels of a week in which I was feeling overwhelmed until I started putting some better metrics to my projects, then began abandoning activities, projects, e-mails, and so on that were gumming up the works. There’s still (much?) more subtracting to do, but the momentum feels great, and the results are already showing.

Reading Matt’s piece last night, in the context of my week-o’-subtraction, made me curious to figure out how many posts I’ve written that address the virtues of doing better by doing less. Here’s the list I came up with:

• 6 April 2009: My definition for Clutter.
• 26 March 2009: Rebuild your to-do list from the ground up.
• 27 February 2009: 11 Ancient Secrets of the Dragon Claw School of Inbox-Fu
• 27 January 2009: A Thought on Handling the Workload on the First Day Back from a Long Weekend . . .
• 26 January 2009: Stop!
• 25 November 2008: Killing off a vampire project.
• 20 November 2008: Productivity tip: Parse ruthlessly.
• 30 October 2008: When do you kill a business?
• 4 August 2008: When is it time to kill a project?
• 2 May 2008: Simplify, simplify.

You’d think by now that I would have adequately heeded my own advice and abandoned all the cruft in my personal systems. But it’s hard to let go of good things in favor of the best things, and sometimes it’s even hard to let go of bad things, simply because of habit.

(Could any of that apply to you? Or to your organization? Maybe a little bit?)

My advice for your weekend

Take a quiet hour — Sunday night works well — when you can outline all your work+life projects. You don’t have to do everything in exhausting detail; just get down everything in an outline version. Then think hard about the abandonment strategy that Matt describes in his article.

Maybe your company needs Peter Drucker-style abandonment, like General Electric needed to streamline at the time Jack Welch took the reins. Maybe your own career needs the kind of abandonment that Jim Collins pursued when he ditched his corporate job to focus on the research, thinking, and writing that has made him a star.

This weekend could be the moment when you begin the same kind of pivot for yourself. It just requires a willingness to (a) look hard at the truths of your own situation, and (b) wield the ax.

What are you abandoning?

~

Photo by Orin Zebest, used under a Creative Commons license.

Category: Management, The working life