![]() ![]() Look at your data to see if that has really occurred. It is a fallacy that you need to keep all your customers because many of the small customers will become large ones. ![]() Be willing to fire the laggards, regularly subtracting out the least valuable 5% of your customers. It is not only employees that need regular evaluation and subtraction, but also your customers. objective and regular), people will respect and embrace what may at first feel a little cold and Darwinian.Ĥ. As long as there is a good review and development process (e.g. Setting the expectation with your employee base that you will be regularly evaluating and taking out weaker folks and promoting stronger ones is the foundation for a performance-driven organization and strong people culture. Not everyone can be an A player, and you owe it to those who are to regularly prune out the bottom. As the saying goes - A’s attracts A’s while B’s attract C’s. Subpar performers drag down an organization. Jack Welch had it right: you should continually subtract out the bottom 10% of your team. Subtract and seduce around a single idea.ģ. A simple story that repeats a consistent theme is better than a truckload of documents and demos. One of the most successful meetings I have had came after I recast a 35-page deck to a one pager during an overseas flight to share with the client upon landing. There’s a propensity to add materials rather than subtract. On a related note, be cautious of the amount of material (PowerPoint slides, documents, etc.) you use. Even worse than getting lost in three supporting points is trying to pitch three distinct ideas. While I have always been taught to pitch or do presentations around three key points, it is easy to slip into focusing on three supporting points and lose the overarching big idea. Great pitches are “do it for me” stories rather than “do it yourself’ or “choose your own adventure.” Conviction comes from subtracting the peripheral and focusing on the most salient story. That’s why you should subtract your three (or more) pitch points down to one core idea. Countless sales pitches get ruined because a prospective buyer is overwhelmed by the choices presented, by sellers creating multiple choice. And avoid cheating by “bucketing” ten things into five categories! Each priority needs to be distinct and mutually exclusive.Ģ. ![]() Subtract your way down to the top five - or, even better, the top three. Most CEOs, though, gravitate toward ten top priorities, maybe even more. For this practice to be effective, there can be no more than five priorities at any point in time. Intellectual honesty around such a document enhances self-awareness and avoids priority drift and the “ shiny ball syndrome” from which many of us as founders or CEOs suffer. When CEO priorities are codified, it provides a recurring reference source for the board and employees. In an earlier post I described the critical CEO best practice of writing an annual letter to the board outlining one’s top priorities. Here are five “laws of subtraction” for business leaders to consider:ġ. How much more direct can you get than to say you need to subtract something? In business, we often dance around the subject by using MBA-speak like “focus,” “alignment,” or “prioritization.” These words imply the need to edit, clarify, and rethink, but aren’t as direct as asking someone to subtract. What sticks with me most about the conversation is the simple pragmatism and prescriptive nature of the word itself - subtraction. By removing things one creates self-imposed constraints, but also clarity and a cleaner context for inspired innovation. In a recent conversation, we discussed the power of subtraction as it applies to innovation. I owe this insight to my friend Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of the TED conferences. But in the world of business it can be a remarkably effective approach. You may or may not agree with this as a philosophy of architecture and design. “Less is more,” the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe liked to say. ![]()
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