Rocks

Ask a struggling leadership team what their priorities are and you will get a list of twelve things delivered with complete confidence. Ask them again ninety days later how those twelve went. The silence tells you everything. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

This Month’s Tool

Rocks are the EOS® discipline of choosing a small number of things that must get done in the next ninety days, assigning each one a single owner, and letting everything else wait its turn. Simple to say. Brutally hard to do, because picking three things means telling nine other good ideas no, and most founders would rather work eighty hours than say no to their own ideas. I have lived both sides of this one. The years I chased everything, we finished almost nothing that mattered. The quarters we picked a few Rocks and defended them, the company moved more in ninety days than it used to move in a year. How strong teams choose their Rocks, and just as important, how they keep them alive past week three when the shine wears off, is what we will work through in the room. Coming into year-end planning season, the timing could not be better.