Sam Decker, at Decker Marketing, gives a good tutorial at the beginning of 2006. Actually 12 of them for us to work on them every month to arhieve one goal – what to say ‘No’. Actually, I found saying ‘No’ is hard, especially when I have just started working. Throughout my career, I found out there are some places I need to learn saying ‘No’ to stay productive and focus.
Sam describes 12 areas in business that we should be choosing which are not in our priority and focus and we should reject them:
- What strategies, initiatives and activities will you say “no” to?
- What measurements will you ignore?
- What customers will you not target?
- What relationships will you not keep?
- What competitors will you not follow?
- What will you remove from your web site?
- What money will you not spend?
- What meetings will you decline?
- What trips will you not make?
- What slides will you not create?
- What will you not say?
- What thoughts will you not entertain?
With some examples and descriptions, those points area valuable as a guideline to check. I enjoy this quote from the article: “We need to say “no”, but we’re not very good at it. In business we give it another name… “prioritization” or “strategic planning”.”
“prioritization” or “strategic planning” means “no”. How true.
Strategic Plan for 2006 — 12 Places to Say No – [Decker Marketing]
[...] Noone wants to be exluded. It’s kind of synonymous with ‘isolated’ or ‘being outlawed’ and it certainly does not seem to be a desirable thing. Nevertheless I think there is more to it than just the negative aspect. A few days ago I met an old friend in a bar in my hometown and we talked a little bit. When I asked him how he came to study BWL (which is business school), he told me the following: Look, after graduating from highschool I felt confronted with a world full of opportunity – law school, medicine, arts, humanities, life science, physics, french – all sorts of stuff to study and make a living from. I just couldn’t decide what I would be most interested in, everything seemed to have both advantages and downsides. When taking a closer look, it even seemed like that most things had more downsides than advantages. So I started to exclude field by field by means of intuitive disinterest. What I ended up with was business school. And now that I am graduating from it, I can say it was a good decision. And a good method: I keep applying it to any kind of situation and it works perfectly well. The latest Lifehack.org post ‘12 places to say no’ promotes exactly this method as ‘the strategic plan for 2006 ‘. Mathematically the idea is nothing else but increasing the relative amount of good stuff by systematically getting rid of the bad stuff. It’s certainly not a new thought, everyone knows and uses it. Yet I think it’s another thing that makes Outfoxed so unique amongst all the other social applications. While the emphasis of del.icio.us , Riffs , Shadows and others lies on recommendation, Outfoxed almost seems to be a about ‘decommendation’, i.e. rating pages / files / entities as bad or even dangerous. Take a look at the front page of Riffs to see their ‘most popular’ section. When I viewed it, Jeniffer Aniston and Halle Berry where on top of it. I don’t say that it sucks all the time or that browsing their page can’t be fun. But if all that social networking can do for me is a thumbs up or down on Halle Berry, I’d rather stay away from that party. Because the web contains more than ‘12 places to say no’ to. [...]
I disagree with the website one… a lot of websites are very cluttered.