The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable... About Restoring Sanity To The Most Important Organization In Your Life (J-B Lencioni Series)

by Patrick Lencioni

“an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

complete control—even if it were possible—would not be desirable. Life should be an adventure.

After more than a decade of marriage, Jude knew when to offer an apology, even if he hadn’t meant to do anything wrong.

“The core purpose at Mary Kay Cosmetics has nothing to do with makeup—it’s all about giving women opportunities in business,” Rob explained. “And Nike’s core purpose is about giving customers a sense of being a competitor. Southwest Airlines, on the other hand, has a more direct core purpose: to make travel affordable for everyone.”

Just start by focusing on core values. Those are the traits or qualities that are fundamental parts of an organization’s culture. You don’t make them up, you just look around and describe what’s already true. Forget what you wish you were, or what the perfect family next door is, and focus on what you are at your core.”

“Aspirational values, on the other hand, are the ones you wish you had because it would make your organization better.”

“So, when you confuse your core values with your aspirational, permission-to-play, and accidental ones, you end up with a very long list of generic-sounding values that only inspire cynicism among employees—who think the executives are in denial about the real culture of the company.”

“The purpose of a strategy is to differentiate a company, but only after you’ve figured out what your company does, why it does it, and what it stands for.”

“Every organization needs to have a top priority. We call it a ‘rallying cry.’”

what’s more important than choosing the right thing is choosing something.

The best companies don’t necessarily make right decisions all the time, but they make clear decisions and get their people rallied around them.

“That’s the thing about a core value. You never abandon it, even if some people don’t like that about you, or even if it’s inconvenient. How can they tell their new hires that humor is important, and encourage them to incorporate humor in just about everything they do, and then tell them to rein it in every time a customer decides it’s not in good taste? They’re going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

we always said we wanted to find every way possible to give our kids every ounce of spare time we have, without crowding them or making us insane.”

“Well, first of all, no one needs to know our strategy but us. We don’t market or advertise it. But more important, it’s up to us to live the way we think is best for our kids and our family. To be purposeful about it all. If someone disagrees with us or chooses a different way, that’s up to them. We’re not trying to make a statement here, just to get clarity about how we manage our family.”

“First question: What makes your family unique or different from every other family on the block?” Jude took it in but didn’t really react, so Theresa went on. “Second question: What is the top priority, the one thing that is most important in your family right now?”

Now that we have this goal of increasing family time, I realize that I have no choice. I know that sounds crazy, because it’s not like I wanted to be away from home in the first place. But now it’s crystal clear why I have to do it, and I honestly believe it will make a big difference.”

The key is, if it’s shorter than a couple months, you won’t have enough time to make progress. If it’s longer than a year, it’s too far out there to start thinking about. Somewhere in between is usually right, and I think for a family two to six months sounds about right.”

Recounting the dysfunction at work made Scott a little more emotional now. “I don’t know. We’re always reacting to whatever the other orthopedic doctors in the area do. We wait for a patient to complain before coming up with a plan. And then everything is suddenly a top priority and everyone’s scrambling around trying to implement some new and ridiculous initiative. And two weeks later, there’s some other new initiative. I barely have enough time to see my regular patients, let alone get more of them. It’s a circus.”

Context is the information and framework we need to make a decision in the most informed, intentional manner possible. Without context, every decision that confronts us, every situation we encounter, calls for unnecessary anxiety, stressful uncertainty, and unproductive conflict. Which, in turn, makes our lives much more challenging than they need to be.

“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”

And yet most of us go about leading and managing our families with almost no formal context. We don’t take time to explicitly decide who we are, what we stand for, what we want, and how we’re going to go about succeeding and thriving as a family. Why don’t we? Because we don’t think of our families as the organizations they are, in need of leadership and planning and strategy. We also feel a little awkward or embarrassed by taking a somewhat formal approach to managing our families, deciding that it sounds silly or overly structured. Finally, we somehow fail to see the cost of our chaos, and the connection it has to real problems like poor mental and physical health, financial failure, and even divorce.

What makes your family unique? If you don’t know what differentiates your family from others, you won’t have a basis for making decisions, and you’ll try to be all things to all people. 2. What is your family’s top priority—rallying cry—right now? You need to know what the single most important objective is for your family over the next two to six months. Without a top priority, everything becomes important and you end up reacting to whatever issues seem urgent that day. 3. How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions? If you answer the first two questions but don’t use those answers in daily, weekly, and monthly decision-making, it will yield no benefits.