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Here’s a chart from some IBM report about “executive priorities in Year III of COVID.” I found the link-out in this newsletter. If you even glance at this chart, you know the main priority of an executive is the third one over: “Cost management.” That’s going to be tied to their bonuses and ability to earn more, and get more, for themselves and their family. The other stuff is important, of course, but it’s not their core priority. Customer retention and cash-flow management might be 2/3 on this list, and everything else is bullshit. Safety they don’t really care about. CRANK THOSE WIDGETS! Enterprise agility? WTF does that mean? And digital transformation has been a buzzword since 2015.
This chart speaks to a bigger problem of corporate existence, though: executives pretend to care about 45 different topics, but only care about 1–2. This keeps the place humming, often, but it confuses the people in the middle and the peons, who lack self-awareness and often thus believe that Executive Eddie saying their thing matters actually means that their thing matters. Nope, Frank. Google the term “lip service.” Executives love to do that.
What’s the old saying about having 10 priorities means you have no priorities? Yep. Most humans are not capable of focusing on 10 things. In reality, most people can (and do) focus on:
- How they generate income
