A little more thought and a lot less scribbling, suggests Dr. Stephen G. Payne, CEO of Leadership Strategies, an international management consulting firm in Princeton. Great ideas do not gush from pen or laptop. They generate from a laser-focused, creative mind. Your own mind.
Together Payne and Alan S.W. Dowie, Senior Manager for an intriguingly unnamed “leading global healthcare company,” have authored the appropriately small volume Manage Your World on One Page. And a lot of my friends will be receiving its helpful counsel for Christmas.
Designed primarily for business leaders, the cover states that guided by such succinct brevity, readers may “align and motivate people, manage complexity” and “communicate priorities.” Yet do not be put off by these unfortunately overused self-help promises. The authors are onto something really original here, well worth your investment in its few, well packed pages.
Payne jokingly asks his own teams, “how many top priorities does it take to get to real chaos?” The quip’s sad irony, as any manager can tell you, is that tasks, programs, and directions within a team tend to proliferate like shrubs. Each one blossoms beside the next, each demanding equal frenetic attention. Instead, Payne and Dowie place our course of action and tasks in a hierarchical template. The process, termed “One-Paging,” stems from a single specific vision. Your company wants to do...what?
Next develop three or four specific, non-fuzzy goals that directly aim at vision fulfillment. Not “increase market share,” but “create 10 new accounts by year’s end.” Each goal leads down to a measurement system, affording you a constant yardstick to check on the team’s progreess toward the goals. Finally, actions are defined in the form of overall strategies, and specific tactics which will fulfill them. The plans feed naturally down to tactics, the tactics feed logically up to the vision.
The hammering out of this five- step process: Vision, Goals, Measures, Strategies, and Tactics, in itself becomes a team project. The book abounds with methods for enhancing imput, and constant checks allowing all actions and members to remain on track. And, as the authors note, “1-Paging is not a one-off activity,...but a continuing process for refreshing motivation, alignment and communication.”
Payne and Dowie’s premise is that thought crystalizes with brevity. We think in words. By forcing our brains to word our vision into a single, summarized essence, we may just, for the very first time, actually realize what it is we’ve been trying to do all these years. Likewise, the quality of communication and understanding catapults qualitatively as we present a strategy in a single phrase. The ideas and plans, say the authors, land on the rest of the team, are easily comprehended, and spark a whole wealth of tactics that point to the strategy. It becomes all so, well, elementary, my dear manager.
One feature that takes this book a far step ahead of typical managment-structuring texts is chapter 6 - “The Personal 1-Page Game Plan.” Long a major tenant of Payne’s managerial philosophy, this chapter insists the leader must first lead himself before he can lead others. Hitching one’s wagon to a corporate star that leads far from your personal orbit is a flight toward disaster. The leader must first discover, write down and keep true to his own vision, goals, etc. Then, he may find how they mesh with any team project. It is demanded for success in business, and more importantly, in life.
Those who enjoy and seek more of Payne and Dowie’s tree-saving approach to planning, can further visit www.1-paging.com. The site elaborates the text, and it allows the reader to challenge his managerial abilities with Payne’s LeaderX Quizzes. So whether we grip a laptop, pen or whiteboard marker, it may be time to give our fingers pause and let our brains work overtime, and direct our futures with a single page of instructions. After all, no one reads the whole manual anyway. Biz4
