Member-only story
Years ago, upon first moving to Texas in a post-graduate school haze, I had this job. It started out pretty interesting and fun and community-laden, and over time it became a hellhole based on my own issues and some of their organizational ones. At the time, something I noticed daily was a massive over-focus on tasks to the exclusion of any actual strategy or long-term, well, anything. I was starting to blog more, in part because of boredom at that job, and I wrote this little ditty on daily deliverables murdering strategy in many orgs.
Flash forward about eight years, and 1.5 weeks ago, I had a call with someone I work with where one comment was “You have too many ideas. What I need is someone who drills on tasks.” Indeed. That was from a senior leader.
I’ve never really understood conceptually why ideas would be bad, and tasks would be good — but if you think about it, it makes a ton of sense. Tasks are controllable outcomes, which businesses and senior-type people tend to like. You can “check off” something and have a sense of process and completeness. Thinking about bigger issues is much more challenging, it’s hard to incorporate multiple levels of feedback, and businesses are pivoting a ton these days anyway, so what is “long-term” really? Three-four weeks?
Still, this over-focus on tasks limits businesses in many ways, as you can see here with a…
