A diversified portfolio is a really bad idea when it comes to strategic initiatives.
A big part of my work is helping SMEs and scale-ups turn their vision, values and strategies into reality. How do we take a list of goals, or our grand vision, or what we say we stand for, and turn it into what people do in the office on Monday morning? Not straightforward.
But if there’s one thing guaranteed to kill off execution, it’s committing to the list of 10 (or 8, or 7).
Because making commitments is easy. Delivering them, not so much. And making LOTS of commitments is a guarantee to deliver very few, if any, of them.
Making commitments when you’re the leader is even more dangerous. Because you’ll take a whole team with you on a journey. And if you have too many journeys, you can guarantee you’ll get nowhere.
Be brutal with prioritisation. Be even more brutal with deprioritisation. Because it’s what’s just off the list of top priorities that will stop you delivering what’s on the list of top priorities.
And 3 things done is infinitely better than 15 things 20% done.
So next time you’re with your leadership team on any kind of strategy execution or project prioritisation process, make sure you’re not committing to so much that your commitments become meaningless.