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Summary
This is part 2 of a 3-part series on prioritization, led by Harry Max, author of Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions. Part 1 | Part 3 For executives, prioritization comes down to the ordinal list of what matters most. The challenge, however, is that they must deal with an array of competing imperatives: how to make money, use resources efficiently, pursue goals and objectives, satisfy existing customers or constituents, grow market share, hire and retain talent, manage unit cost economics, and so on. And pitting one imperative against another is tricky business. It’s a tightrope act. But leaving it to chance isn’t an option. Effective prioritization unlocks the latent power of teams. It supercharges strategy activation and taps the potential to align people to accelerate and get traction. Clear priorities enable change. This conversation will explore why leaders must prioritize at the right logical level to achieve their desired results.
Key Insights
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Leadership prioritization involves managing epic challenges due to conflicting imperatives and scale, unlike individual or small team prioritization.
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Prioritization is best understood as a continuous process, supported by periodic and episodic events that formalize decision moments.
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Effective prioritization balances speed versus accuracy; doing it too slowly or too quickly can lead to costly mistakes.
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Delegation works best when leaders assign ownership to those whose strengths align with the priority and who can independently drive it forward.
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Explicit and mature operating models, like Salesforce’s V2MOM or EOS, are critical for aligning priorities and managing work effectively across large teams.
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Publishing clear priority lists reduces organizational noise by allowing teams to focus on what truly matters and avoid unnecessary distractions.
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Lower-priority tasks, such as technical debt or infrastructure improvements, must be acknowledged as necessities or managed carefully with dedicated time budgets.
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Priorities guide attention and options but do not replace judgment; decision-making still requires balancing competing needs based on context and risk.
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Prioritizing at the right organizational level of abstraction is crucial to avoid breaking coordination across functions or missing stakeholders.
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Starting prioritization improvement individually encourages a ripple effect, helping to align teams and eventually organizations more naturally.
Notable Quotes
"You never have enough time or enough people to actually get done everything you wish you could, so you learn to prioritize well or you won’t be successful."
"Prioritization is like hiking — you’re always looking where you’re putting your feet and adjusting continuously based on what you see around you."
"All lists are prioritized lists; even bullet lists have an order, and the most important should be at the top."
"Your priorities don’t tell you what to do; your judgment points you in the direction of how to allocate resources and make decisions."
"Getting the date right is really important — you can change it once, but don’t change it twice, or it breaks coordination."
"You want to delegate something only if the person has ownership, competency, and feels safe to come back and ask for help if needed."
"Companies where prioritization goes well typically have an explicit operating model and a level of maturity around it."
"The way to fix a bad decision is to make several good ones afterward, because there is no undo button."
"Publishing your explicit list of priorities is a great way to reduce noise and focus the organization’s efforts."
"Prioritize at the right level because it’s easy to miss important stakeholders or criteria by working too narrowly."
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