November 25, 2010

Roy’s Rule of 3

So, here you are. You have plotted a new course for your organization and now you need to determine the activities you need to undertake to see your brave idea turn into reality. You sit down either by yourself or with a team of people to decide what has to be done. You stand with a clean sheet of paper and issue the directive ‘Let’s brainstorm and identify all the things we need to do to implement our new plan’. Good idea?

Well, it can be or it can create alot of activity but little movement forward. It’s ok to create a ‘list of possibilities’ of activities and projects that you feel should be undertaken, but if you don’t apply a strict prioritization discipline and screen the list to the critical few, then you will be constantly chasing things in a reactive mode and will never know if you are making progress (the reality is that progress will elude you in this mode of operation).

The issue is that if you want to successfully execute your new strategy you need to bear down on as few activities as necessary to get results. You simply don’t have enough resources and bandwidth to do an effective job on 25 things you have on your brainstorming list. Multitasking is deadly when you are trying to change your strategic direction and need to take on new things.

Enter Roy’s Rule of 3 which I discuss in Chapter Sixteen of my book BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Determine the 3 things (or maybe 4 or 5, but NOT a dozen!) that will produce 80% of your expected results and get on with them. The point is that you need to look at your brainstorming list and discriminate between those activities or action items that are critical and those that are not in terms of delivering your expected results. If you can’t define the critical few, it indicates that you really don’t understand your strategy and what execution is necessary to get you going.

Jim Collins, Author of Good to Great says it this way “If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any.”

Spend time on Roy’s Rule…. it will pay off handsomely for you.

Cheers,
Roy

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Strategy Creation | Marketing | Permalink
Posted 11.25.10 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing | Read Comments (1) | Leave a Comment