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The Essence of Time Management in One Paragraph
Stephen Covey pulls together the essence of time management into four sentences:
The essence of time management is to set priorities and then to organize and execute around them. Setting priorities requires us to think carefully and clearly about values, about ultimate concerns. These then have to be translated into long- and short- term goals and plans translated once more into schedules or time slots. Then, unless something more important — not something more urgent — comes along, we must discipline ourselves to do as we planned. (From Principle Centered Leadership, p 138.)
Managing in a Downturn: Don't Overreact
Post 4 in the series: Managing in a Downturn.
We’ve seen that recessions are opportunities for those who refuse to obsess on the constraints of the external environment (post 2) and that one corollary of this is that you shouldn’t retreat (post 3).
Another corollary is that you shouldn’t overreact. Baveja, Ellis, and Rigby’s article continues:
Companies that fared poorly during the last recession exhibited a common response: they overreacted, then “stayed the course” even when rougher seas lay ahead.
The lesson? If your strategy isn’t showing results, reevaluate it. don’t expect it to start paying dividends just because the economy is recovering. Winning firms react to trouble early, scrapping ideas that aren’t working and turbocharging those that are. Firms that hunker down can miss opportunities and create even bigger problems down the road.
So don’t overreact, but if you do, make sure to course correct in a timely manner.
Perhaps the primary and most important example of over-reacting is excessive cost-cutting. That will be the subject of the next post.
Posts in This Series
- Managing in a Downturn: An Introduction
- Managing in a Downturn: The Good News
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Retreat
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Overreact
- Managing in a Downturn: Be Careful of Cost-Cutting Campaigns
- Managing in a Downturn: Keep Making Meaning
- Managing in a Downturn: It’s Time to Hire
9 Productivity Practices in one Paragraph
This is an excellent, dense summary of some key productivity practices from Stephen Covey’s Principle Centered Leadership. I count 9 practices here:
Highly effective people carry their agenda with them. Their schedule is their servant, not their master. They organize weekly, adapt daily. However, they are not capricious in changing their plan. They exercise discipline and concentration and do not submit to moods and circumstances. They schedule blocks of prime time for important planning, projects, and creative work. They work on less important and less demanding activities when their fatigue level is higher. They avoid handling paper [and email!] more than once and avoid touching paperwork [and email!] unless they plan on taking action on it.
Managing in a Downturn: Don't Retreat
Post 3 in the series: Managing in a Downturn
We saw in the previous post that recessions are actually intense crucibles of opportunity. But you will be unable to capitalize on this opportunity unless you retain the faith that you will prevail despite the brutal facts (the Stockdale Paradox) and take ownership of your situation instead of focusing on the systemic problems.
A critical corollary of these realities is: Don’t retreat.
It can be tempting to think that recessions should be treated like hurricanes. You don’t go outdoors. You go indoors and retreat. Or, if it’s bad enough, leave town altogether.
But if you do this in a recession — if you treat it like a hurricane and hunker down — your strategy will backfire.
The Harvard Business Review article that I quoted previously goes on to say:
Many managers tolerate subpar results during a recession, believing that their firms will accelerate past competitors once the economy recovers. This rarely happens [emphasis added]. More than two-thirds of the companies that made major gains in our study period did so during a recession, not before or after [emphasis added again].
The authors give Dell as an example of a company that took intelligent action in light of the recession:
In 2001, Dell Computer grew unit sales by 11% even as industry sales declined 12%. Realizing that price elasticity sometimes increase during a recession, Dell used sensible price cuts to gain more than six points in U.S. market share and, in the toughest period of all — the fourth quarter of 2001 — to capture more than 90% of the profits in its industry.
Such opportunities always exist for strong companies, but the impact of exercising them is much higher during a recession, when many competitors are either distracted or hibernating.
In other words, one of the reasons that recessions present such an opportunity is precisely because most of your competitors are hunkering down or losing focus. Don’t fall into that trap, and you can advance. (Even if you are a non-profit, where your competition is not always another non-profit, but perhaps something less tangible — apathy, for example? — or time and attention and dollars spent on other things generally.)
Another reason you don’t want to hibernate in a recession is that “gains or losses made during a recession tend to endure.” As the article points out:
Of the firms that made major gains in revenue or profitability during the last recession, more than 70% sustained those gains through the next boom cycle. The corollary was also true: fewer than 30% of those that lost ground were able to regain their positions.
So if you advance during a recession, you are likely to hold that ground. But if you lose ground, you are unlikely to recover it.
In sum: Don’t retreat.
And here’s a post I wrote last January that says a bit more on thus: Recessions are Not for Hunkering Down.
Posts in This Series
- Managing in a Downturn: An Introduction
- Managing in a Downturn: The Good News
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Retreat
- Managing in a Downturn: Don’t Overreact
- Managing in a Downturn: Be Careful of Cost-Cutting Campaigns
- Managing in a Downturn: Keep Making Meaning
- Managing in a Downturn: It’s Time to Hire