The City Bin Co. alternates between a Critical Number and Quarterly Theme that are focused on improving the People side of the business (“180 to One,” “Saving Mrs. Ryan”) and the Process side of the business (“Life Begins at 40,” “Bin it,” “Bin’s Health”). It’s important to find the same kind of balance as you sequence your #1 priorities.

Entropy

It is not hard to see entropy at work… Despite all the high-level concepts consultants advertise, the bread and butter of every consultant’s business is undoing entropy—cleaning up the debris and weeds that grow in every organizational garden.

Systematic time management is therefore the next step. One has to find the nonproductive, time-wasting activities and get rid of them if one possibly can. This requires asking oneself a number of diagnostic questions.

1. First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time without any results whatever. To find these time-wastes, one asks of all activities in the time records: “What would happen if this were not done at all?” And if the answer is, “Nothing would happen,” then obviously the conclusion is to stop doing it. …

1. The next question is: “Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?” … “Delegation” as the term is customarily used, is a misunderstanding—is indeed misdirection. But getting rid of anything that can be done by somebody else so that one does not have to delegate but can really get to one’s own work—that is a major improvement in effectiveness.

1. A common cause of time-waste is largely under the executive’s control and can be eliminated by him. That is the time of others he himself wastes. There is no one symptom for this. But there is still a simple way to find out. That is to ask other people. Effective executives have learned to ask systematically and without coyness: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask this question, and to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive…

Again, you simply can’t think efficiency with people. You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things. I’ve tried to be “efficient” with a disagreeing or disagreeable person and it simply doesn’t work. I’ve tried to give ten minutes of “quality time” to a child or an employee to solve a problem, only to discover such “efficiency” creates new problems and seldom resolves the deepest concern. I see many parents, particularly mothers with small children, often frustrated in their desire to accomplish a lot because all they seem to do is meet the needs of little children all day. Remember, frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities.

And this story repeats itself through the history of management science; almost every classic of the literature seems to have described a way of adapting systems to a more complicated world, and then to have become obsolete itself. If you look past the slogans and think about what things like ‘management by objectives’, ‘focus on core competences’ and so on actually mean, they are all different ways of advising executives to restructure their businesses so that they don’t generate complexity faster than it can be managed.