I have read and reread Jim Collins book ‘Good to Great’. The information that he presented regarding the Intersection of Three Circles is a very novel idea for a business.

For those of you who have not read this book… (please do), here are the basics of the Hedgehog concept
I feel lucky when I get to…
Identify something that you have God given talent (or genetically encoded) for…
And, I can make money doing…

Now you may notice that I have put a personal spin on the above versus having a business spin. Well that was on purpose.

If you take the above three items and write down on a separate piece of paper the answer to each of those questions… you will start learning something about yourself.

Heck ask your friends or business colleagues to add to each of the lists.

After time for reflection on what you wrote down on each list. Try to craft a position, a job, and even more importantly, a life around the intersection of those three questions.

You will be good at your job, you will like your job… and heck you will even get paid for it!

Additional steps to becoming a great leader are coming…

The ‘rules of engagement’ or ‘the code’ or ‘the unwritten rules’ or how about just common courtesy…

When you run a meeting do you have a set of ground rules that everyone must abide?

For example…

Only one person talks at a time.   Or, no one can talk more than 1 minute and then some one else has to speak.

Setting up the ground rules lets everyone communicate.  What happens if you have a slow talker or someone does not like to talk?  What do you do about these folks?

As an informed leader, you need to understand the make up of your team so that you can make sure that everyone’s opinion is represented during the team discussion.

The next time you sit in a meeting take a look around and watch the dynamics in the room.  Is everyone participating and actively engaged?  If not, try to figure out why.

Then develop a code of conduct that will make sure that everyone is engaged and participating.

As promised here is a great tool that you can use to prioritize multiple competing events.

I will explain the process first and then post an example of the spreadsheet on my google documents account for all to see.

So here are the steps…
1. Identify 2 to 7 things that you want to base your results on. For example, say you were designing a product and you wanted low cost; high quality; and quick project schedule delivery. Gosh can I ask for anything else? Your three important attributes would be

• Low Cost
• High Quality
• Quick Delivery

2. Next you need to think about how important each of them is in relation to each other on a 1 to 10 scale. Not all of them can be tens. You are kidding yourself if you think they are. One has to slightly outweigh the others. And if you do a reality check, chances are you will find that one is more than a couple points important than the other.

3. Define all of your competing projects, priorities, product designs, concepts or whatever you are basically trying to choose from.

4. Rank each of the above competing projects on the following scale:

• 1: Little or no relationship to the attribute details in item 1
• 3: Some relationship or secondary relationship to the attribute detailed in item 1
• 7: Expected relationship between concept or project and attribute detailed in item 1
• 10: Direct correlation between the attribute and the project

5. Ok here is the tricky part. You need to take the ranking in item 2 and multiply by each of the ranks in item 4 and then add them up. It is easier to see this in the spreadsheet.

Think about this tool on any item that you need to prioritize.

Believe it or not sometimes a project has more than one goal.

Sometimes they even have three Goals!

Consider this quick example… you can either have:
Something Quick, or
Something Cheap, or
Something with High Quality.

You can’t have all three.
Want it Quick? Then you better expect to pay for it!

So what do you do?

Sacrifice one and measure the other two? No, you should actually measure all three. And optimize the result.

Even if you can only maintain one of the three at the current level and improve the other two… that is a win! But you need to make sure that you at least measure all three if they are important.

Chart, compare, monitor all three.

Now, there is one assumption made during all of this… and it is probably a wrong assumption.

All three metrics are weighted equally.

Now… tune in for the next post to figure out how to weigh these goals out.

It is a pretty slick and easy tool to use.

Prioritization Matrix