Second, establishing priorities is not the same thing as binding yourself to them. In one series of interviews led by William F. Pounds of MIT, managers were asked to share the important problems they were facing in their organizations. Most managers mentioned five to eight problems. Later in the interview, they were asked to describe their activities from the previous week. Pounds shared the punch line that “no manager reported any activity99 which could be directly associated with the problems he had described.” They’d done no work on their core priorities! Urgencies had crowded out
...more
