If you’re like most folks, with the New Year, you’ve spent time developing a new set of resolutions and to-do lists that you hope to accomplish by the end of 2011.
These are worthwhile traditions given that setting achievable goals is an important part of any successfully run enterprise.
We recommend you add a new ritual to your beginning-of-the-year planning and thinking that can be equally as powerful: create “stop-doing lists.”
Every business or organization has activities it should stop doing or services or products it should stop selling. Just like the most beautiful tree or plant that needs to be pruned occasionally, your business needs to cut the unimportant stuff.
Most organizations don’t go through this exercise of trimming because it’s so much more exciting to use our creative skills to add innovative products and services.
Entrepreneurs, by their very nature, are people in motion, always creating and generating new ideas. It takes a different set of skills to cut back because of the emotional commitment you have to your own creation. And it is doubly tough if you’ve been selling a product for many years and it has been even marginally successful.
As Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great,” writes in his book: “Most of us lead busy lives. We have ever-expanding ‘to-do’ lists, trying to build momentum by doing, doing, doing — and doing more. And it rarely works. Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of ‘stop-doing’ lists as ‘to-do’ lists. They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.”
Peter Drucker, whom some consider the father of modern management, once wrote, “The job is … not to set priorities. That is easy. Everybody can do it. The reason why so few executives concentrate on a few important tasks is the difficulty of setting ‘posteriorities’ — that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle — and of sticking to the decision.”
This leads to three important questions:
What is the junk in your company?
And as Collins asks, do you have the discipline to stop doing the wrong things?
And where do you start with creating a stop-doing list?
Collins suggests starting with how you create budgets for your company. He writes, “budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all. The budget process is not about figuring out how much activity gets, but about determining which activities should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.”
The next area to look at is those activities, policies, procedures, rituals and traditions you’ve done for a lengthy period of time and then ask the hard question: Does it still make sense to be doing it this way?
A third area is the products or services your company offers. What should you stop selling? What customers should you no longer serve? This area is probably the most challenging for most entrepreneurs to make changes. It’s even a more difficult task when you take into account today’s challenging economy. We understand the great hesitation of any business owner to stop selling even the marginally profitable products because these products help pay the bills. How can you afford to cut them?
We found Drucker’s thinking in this area particularly helpful. He wrote, “The most dangerous traps for a leader are those near-successes where everybody says that if you just give it another big push it will go over the top. One tries it once. One tries it twice. One tries it a third time. But by then it should be obvious this will be very hard to do.”
Writers’ note: This column marks the third anniversary of our twice-monthly column on entrepreneurship. We’d like to thank our readers for their support and discerning feedback. We hope we’ve been true to our word to spark a conversation about the importance of small business to the economic vitality of our community and we look forward to continuing this critical discussion.
Pat Sisneros is the vice president of college services at Everett Community College. Juergen Kneifel is an associate faculty in the EvCC Entrepreneurship program. Please send your comments to entrepreneurship@everettcc.edu.
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