During the calmer days of summer, many people—in or away from the office—mull over some of the big things they and their organizations ought to be doing. The result is a proliferation of To-Do lists that pull together ideas for projects and new initiatives hopefully on the horizon. As an exercise, it’s inevitable but all too often unproductive. What most people could really use is a Don’t-Do list.
This is not a new idea but it’s arguably more urgent than ever.
Firms today are under intense pressure to explore new sources of revenue and avenues of growth. The upshot: more ideas and possibilities are undoubtedly finding their way onto the To-Do lists. So we need to lay down some “boundary conditions,” as the mathematicians like to say. With so many options (made possible in part by the explosion of technology and data), we need to be explicit about what we’re not going to try to do.
In his celebrated book Good to Great, Jim Collins pushed the idea of “stop doing” lists. “If you look back on the good-to-great companies, they displayed remarkable courage to channel their resources into only one or a few arenas,” Collins wrote. They had the discipline “to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.”
Recently I found myself drawing up a list of don’t dos for my organization—the management school where I serve as dean. The university of which we are a part was embarking on a new strategic planning process, and I and my colleagues wanted to put a stake in the ground. We want to be crystal-clear about what we’re aiming to do in the coming years—and not do.
One item on our Don’t-Do list was executive education. That usually means non-credit, academic programs running as little as a day or two, for executives who hold down full-time jobs. Many schools have found success with those kinds of programs, and for a while it was on the table for consideration at our school.
In the end, we decided that executive education is a don’t. Aside from the fact that the executive education market has been lagging, it’s not a great fit for our school. We’re best known for the undergraduate experience we provide to management students and the scholarly research conducted by our faculty, as well as for some highly regarded graduate degree programs. For some schools, executive education might be a solid opportunity for growth. For us, it would probably be an “opportunity” to spread ourselves too thin—and to not be great at something.
That’s the kind of thinking behind a Don’t-Do list. There are only a few things that are really important to an organization at any given time—a few initiatives, or maybe just one initiative, worth spearheading. In all organizations, big and small, there’s a scarcity of resources including people, money, time, and technology. Inevitably, you’re not going to have all the resources you need to do everything you want.
Creating A Don’t-Do List
So, what ought to be on your Don’t-Do list? If you’re talking about a particular organization’s projects and initiatives, everyone will be different. There are no generic items, but a good place to start is with your overflowing To-Do list. Undoubtedly there’s some “extraneous junk” on that list (to uses Collins’s words), and you’ll want to get rid of that right away. But most of the items are not garbage. You've put them on there for a reason.
In general, there are two questions to ask about an initiative on the do list: 1.) If we do this, will we be really good at it? and 2.) Will it make a difference in the market? To answer these questions, you need to have a clear-eyed view of the competition and the possibilities of getting the results you want. Will the idea or initiative have a real impact on your performance? Will it move the needle?
If the answers are no, the idea should be exiled to the Don’t-Do list.
Knowing what you’re good at—and realizing it can’t be everything—is a huge part of this thought process. No less a figure than IBM founder Thomas Watson once acknowledged: “I’m no genius. I’m smart in spots—but I stay around those spots.” Go outside of those spots, and you’re in the Don’t Zone.
What makes it all tricky is that our do lists are often brimming with good ideas. And you’ll probably need to eject a number of those too. It’s a challenge Steve Jobs understood very well.
Robert Sutton, a professor of engineering and management science at Stanford University, tells of advice that Jobs was known to give fellow executives when invited to speak with them. On occasion those sessions came around to the subject of bad ideas and the task of purging them. That’s no sweat, Jobs would say, adding that almost anyone can do that. The tricky part, he stressed, is killing off good ideas—which must be done.
His point was that any successful idea requires a vast amount of attention, and there are only so many ideas that can get this sort of treatment. Many good ones will have to go. “The challenge is to be tough enough to do the pruning so that the survivors have a chance of being implemented properly and reaching their full potential,” Sutton wrote some years ago.
This gets back to resources and time. To be implemented successfully, every new idea or initiative has to be developed, tested, piloted, revised, and continually improved. You can’t do that with every good, or even great, idea.
But you want to be able to work with as many of those good ideas as possible. And that’s where the “stop doing” list also comes into play.
Most firms are doing at least some things no longer fruitful or necessary. If they were to stop doing them, they’d free up resources to run with some of their good new ideas. This is true enough, but especially in established organizations, it’s hard to stop doing what you’ve been doing all along. As John Maynard Keynes said, “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”
Start Closing Your Options
There are larger lessons here.
David Brooks, the insightful New York Times columnist, has spoken counter-intuitively about the need to close some of your options. His comments are directed at public servants but they’re applicable to leadership in the private sector and performance in general.
Finally, close off your options. People in public life live in a beckoning world. They have an array of opportunities. They naturally want to keep all their options open. The shrewd strategists tell them to make a series of tepid commitments to see what pans out. Hedge your bets. Play it smart.
But the shrewd strategy leads to impotence. You spread yourself thin. You dissipate your energies and never put full force behind any cause. You make your own trivial career the object of your attention, not the vision that inspired you in the first place.
Brooks adds, discerningly: "The public official who does this leaves no mark. Only the masters of renunciation leave an imprint, only those who can say a hundred Nos for the sake of an overwhelming Yes."
It’s okay to think expansively about all the new things your organization could do. But there also comes a time to start thinking about how to close off options with a timely dose of don’ts.
Andy Boynton is the John and Linda Powers Family Dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.
William Bole provided editorial assistance for this post.
