Peter Drucker once said: “We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don’t spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop doing.”
This is largely because we get credit for doing something good and we rarely get any kind of credit when we stop doing something not so good.
As Marshall Goldsmith says in his book: What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There, they are the flip side of the same coin. Stopping some behaviors gets no attention but can be as crucial as everything else combined.
I run into many business leaders who could benefit from a Stop Doing List in addition to their To Do List. But we rarely take time to create such a list. Many of these business leaders are dealing with too much distraction in their business and personal lives and have not taken the time to think about what they shouldn’t be doing.
If we want to accelerate our performance, we need to learn to say no and stop doing those things that take us away from focusing on that which has the greatest ROI of our time, energy, and money. When we are dealing with too much distraction, the day, week, and month slips by, and we haven’t done anything.
We need to take our lives back and get focused on those activities that will have the greatest ROI of our time, energy, and money. These are limited resources and need to be used wisely. How we invest these resources is critical to our success. We need to aggressively focus on distraction removal.
With over 40 years of C-level business experience and an MBA in organizational development, I am uniquely qualified to help you achieve success in your business. Give me a call: 503-312-3145.
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