I have noticed two common patterns that typically emerge when teams lack clarity of purpose.
As poet Mary Oliver wrote: Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?
According to Porter, A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions.3
AN INNER PROCESS STANDS IN NEED OF OUTWARD CRITERIA. —Ludwig Wittgenstein
If we could be truly excellent at only one thing, what would it be?
Almost everything is noise, and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.
That may be one reason why Stephen King has written, To write is human, to edit is divine.6
If the answer isn’t a definite yes then it should be a no. It
Editing aids the effortless execution of the Essentialist by removing anything distracting or unnecessary or awkward.
But undergirding their highly selective screening process is more than a gut reaction (although that matters too). What may seem like a capricious decision is really the result of a disciplined and co...
And the cost of hiring too many wrong people (and one wrong hire often leads to multiple wrong hires because the wrong person will tend to attract more wrong people) is what Guy Kawasaki called a Bozo...
A sense of ownership is a powerful thing. As the saying goes, nobody in the history of the world has washed their rental car! This is because of something called the endowment effect, our tendency to...
A non-Essentialist approaches every trade-off by asking, How can I do both? Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating question, Which problem do I want? An Essentialist makes trade-...
El camino del esencialista es la búsqueda incansable de ese menos pero mejor.