essence and maintenance

In one bewildering season of my time as CEO, Ben made a typically perfect book recommendation. He suggested I skim The Four Disciplines of Execution. I did and then carried chunks of it to my team and said - we are doing this. Let’s try it.

I liked the realism of the recommendations in the book. Specifically, the authors recognize that there is inevitably a “whirlwind” of responsibilities blowing around and through any brilliant central stratagem you and your team have come up with. Total, exclusive focus on the most important thing isn’t really possible or advisable. Someone has to file all the state taxes, answer customer calls, make sure that the right number of rooms are booked for the conference (anyone who works in operations knows this list could stretch to another 50-100 items before you have to think hard).

For his part, Greg McKeown recommends making a daily list of essential items and maintenance items: 2 essential and 3 maintenance. Richard Rumelt’s writing about the cost of having a strategy at all presumes that you’ve got beaucoup maintenance on your hands and may have to tradeoff on some of that maintenance to execute your strategy (so think twice, dear reader, before you commit to having a strategy at all).

The through line here is essence and maintenance. Classifying the two in your own work, giving them both their due. Especially in fast-paced early days, where you’re scrambling for survival or, happily, scrambling to keep up with rampant demand, you can lose sight of one of these two halves. 

Often, essence feels sexy and maintenance feels safe. Different people on the team will be drawn to one of the two, so much so that they’ll see it as the sole guarantor of success. A challenging truth is pretty much every day of an organization’s life (and of your own) requires attention on both.

-eric