October 2005

Are You Doing The Right Things? Or Just Doing Things Right?
by Karen Janowski, Principal, KJ & Co.

Are you and your team working on the right things? Are you spending time and money on activities that will enhance your company's value in the medium- and long-term?

This article provides six practical tips on how to avoid the urgency traps that get in the way of doing the right things and how to stay focused on the activities important to the growth and health of your business.

Urgency vs. Importance

You are probably familiar with the urgency/importance matrix popularized by Stephen Covey in his best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly EffectivePeople. The matrix contains four quadrants divided along the two dimensions of "urgency" and "importance."

Of course, we all intend to spend most of our energy and resources on the important activities in the top half of the matrix. But, in reality, we often focus on the urgent left half of the matrix.

Keeping busy and focusing on the urgent is seductive. If you're like most executives, it is easy to be busy. Others want your input, require your approval, or request your participation in meetings or discussions. You're not just a cog in the wheel. You feel essential, productive, busy!

However, if all your activity is driven by the urgent, simply doing a lot of things—even doing them well—will not ensure that your organization will achieve its long-term aims.

To "move the needle" on the success gauge, you and your staff have to do the right things even when they are not urgent.

Six Tips for Doing the Right Things

If you are already focusing on the important things—whether urgent or not—read no further. (Congratulations! You are part of a distinct minority.) However, if you really want to focus more on important activities here are six tips to help you distinguish the important from the urgent.

• Have regular contact with outsiders
• Find an internal buddy with a different point of view
• Encourage news from the front
• Set strategic quarterly objectives
• Question underlying assumptions
• Farm out some of the strategic heavy lifting

This is challenging stuff. If you can only incorporate one of these tips into your work, make it Tip #1.

Tip #1: Have regular contact with "outsiders"

One of the most practical ways to stay focused on the real priorities is to maintain frequent contact with the "outside world." Make some time each week to focus externally. Talk with an industry analyst. Meet with a customer. Have lunch with a peer in a different industry. Attend meetings of relevant trade associations.

You probably do this to some extent but do you make it a weekly priority? Do you schedule it? As Covey glibly writes: "don't prioritize your schedule; schedule your priorities." Look at your calendar one or two weeks out. Is "contact with outsiders" on it? If not, schedule something now.

Frequent contact with the world outside your company can help you gain a fresh perspective on the strategic essentials of your business. It can raise your level of thinking a notch.

Tip #2: Find an internal buddy with a different point of view

Pick a peer you respect and who has a broad strategic perspective. Develop a relationship with this person. Use him or her as a sounding board or even to collaborate on fresh strategic ideas.

Find someone who has a slightly different point of view from yours. For example, if you're the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Financial Officer or head of operations can make an excellent buddy. Your peers in sales or product development may be less helpful in providing a different point of view.

If you're the CEO, you may want to make this an "external buddy" so that you don't play favorites or cause unintended political repercussions.

Tip #3: Encourage news from the front

Inspire your subordinates to have regular contact with the outside world too. Encourage them to update you on their contacts with customers, partners and industry players. If you have regular staff meetings or one-on-one meetings with your team members, spend a few minutes discussing market trends, recent actions by competitors, or interesting uses of your product. One of the most effective CEOs I know starts his weekly executive staff meeting with such a discussion. It's almost like an opening invocation.

Encourage the sharing of both favorable and unfavorable information. Be open to hearing information that doesn't fit with your assumptions. Treat the messenger with respect.

Tip #4: Set strategic quarterly objectives

Many executives establish periodic objectives for their companies, themselves and the members of their teams. The best-run firms provide incentives and rewards for achieving objectives. But often the objectives do not emphasize strategy. For example, the following would be a good, measurable objective:

• "Successfully launch product X as measured by achieving $12 million in sales by the end of June."

It may be an important objective but it's fairly tactical and short-term. A more strategic objective might be:

• "By the end of Q2, identify and evaluate at least three new market opportunities with the goal of finding one that could deliver incremental revenue of $15 million/year by 2007."

Tip #5: Question underlying assumptions

Allow yourself to play skeptic. Examine one or two of the activities that consume large amounts of your resources. What are the key assumptions underpinning these projects?

For example, if your staff is working on a price reduction, will that price change really increase sales as much as projected? If you're developing a new service product, will the sales force really propose it with every sale or will it appeal to just a few salespeople and customers?

It's difficult to identify the underlying assumptions—much less question them. Organizations have a way of passing along ideas until they become strongly held beliefs—even though they may have no basis in reality. Watch out for these hidden assumptions. If your assumptions are wrong, your team may invest in products and programs that are not the "right things" to do.

Tip #6: Farm out some of the strategic heavy lifting

Sometimes the only way to focus on the key strategic issues is to hire a consultant, who can provide supplemental bandwidth and expertise and, perhaps most importantly, can bring an objective perspective.

And once you've committed budget dollars to a particular consulting project, you are much more likely to attend to the related strategic issues – even if they are not urgent.

©2005. KJ & Co., All rights reserved.

Karen Janowski, principal and founder of KJ & Co., has over 20 years experience bringing new technology products to market. She has successfully launched more than 30 products, which generated over $500 million in revenue. Prior to founding KJ & Co. in 1997, Karen served as vice president of marketing for 12 years in a range of technology companies, including Electronic Arts, Epyx, Resumix, Quantum Corp. and VideoStream. She has been a member of the executive teams of four pre-IPO startup companies. She has a B.S. in economics and finance from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley and an M.B.A. in marketing and small business management from Stanford University. Karen can be reached at 650-947-9800 or kjanowski@kjco.com.