Soundview's Leadership Alert
August 2013
From: Andrew Clancy
Executive Editor
Soundview Executive Book Summaries®
A Single Question Can Cut Through Chaos
The ONE Thing - Jay Papasan If you were to poll a hundred
executives, you'd probably find a majority possess the opinion that the path to
more productivity requires more of everything: more work, more deadlines and
more hours. The only activity for which success seems to require less is sleep.
Gary Keller, co-founder of Keller Williams Realty, and Jay Papasan, vice
president of publishing at Keller Williams, argue that you can gain more
success and have less distractions, clutter and stress. In this interview,
Papasan talks about the principles of the pair's book The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly
Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. He discusses why success requires a
counterintuitive approach, the staying power of success myths and how to focus
on your company's "One Thing."
Soundview: The premise for this book is such a much-needed
message in today's business world. There is so much focus on growth, expansion,
stretching one's priorities and "fighting battles on many fronts."
What truths did you discover about heading in the opposite direction and going
small?
Jay Papasan: It's a counterintuitive thing. I think a lot of
people have thought of and written about the idea of achieving more by doing
less. But the message for us was extremely timely. It's really been in the last
decade that the artificial barriers between so many of the areas of our lives
have fallen away. People are just taking on more and more. Kids are rolling
their books to school in rolling backpacks. I've seen that in third graders
because their homework load is too high. At work we're doing the same thing.
We're overbooked. We have too many obligations between home and the office and
it just divides all of our focus and people end up really stressed out. To me,
great books do two things. They serve as vitamins. They give you something
positive. But they're also aspirin. They take some pain away. This idea of
multiple demands on our time, especially if you're an executive, I think we can
really do a good job of giving people a reason for saying "No more."
We want to help them say no to the stuff that doesn't matter so they can focus
on what does matter.
Soundview: You write about six lies that serve as barriers
to success. Why have these negative concepts had such staying power?
Papasan: We talked about this idea of a word that Stephen
Colbert made popular "truthiness." It sounds like it's true and
because it does we want to believe it. A lot of things that we think contribute
to success are actually deceptions. That's why we call them lies. They're
deceptive. We think that they matter, so that's why they get perpetuated. The
biggest one that people talk about all the time is multitasking. When we were
knee-deep in researching this book, you could go on Monster.com and applicants
for jobs would be plugging the fact that they were great multitaskers. If you
really follow the literature, over the last number of years, that theory has
been completely debunked. Yet people still talk and brag about it daily. They
brag about it and it's just not factually true. There's a handful of ideas like
that that just really get in the way. They sound like they're true, but they're
not.
Soundview: The first step on the simple path to productivity
is the focusing question. Tell us about the connection between the big picture
and the small focus when asking the focusing question.
Papasan: The focusing question is a key part of what we've
been doing in consulting with top executives for years. It's the phrase,
"What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will
be easier or unnecessary?" We contend that most people know that answer.
It's the thing in their lives that has the most leverage, the most ability to
get results. It's a big focus question and a small one. From a big picture,
we're asking, "What's the one thing our company does better than anyone
else?" With Nike, you immediately answer "Shoes." The foundation
was with footwear. With Google, they're an ad company and if they ever forget
that, they're going to go way astray. From a big picture standpoint you want to
know what your one big thing is because then you look around and you allocate
resources appropriately. In the moment, in the small focus, you can also be in
the middle of one of those days when your hair is on fire and there's a million
competing priorities. When that happens, you can ask that question and it helps
you say no to all the other urgent but unimportant stuff and say yes to what
matters in the moment.
Soundview: In the chapter on "The Path to Great Answers,"
there's a single sentence that no reader should overlook: "A new answer
usually requires new behavior, so don't be surprised if along the way to
sizable success you change in the process." There may be a degree of fear
associated with such a change. How do people embrace it rather than withdraw
from it?
Papasan: The first step is realizing that we've all been
through this type of change already. I've got small kids and my daughter just
learned how to ride a bike without training wheels. The majority of adults went
through that journey a long time ago, and they've forgotten how scary an
experience it is for the child. If you think about our journey growing up,
we've adopted bigger and bigger models for our lives and behaviors for our
lives. We've learned to drive. We've learned to balance our checkbook,
hopefully, right? All of these other things that adults do, we take for granted
after we've mastered them. A lot of the time when you're looking out for
something big and something new, and that's what executives do all the time,
they ask, "What's the next big thing, the vision for the future?"
it's going to require a lot of change for the executive and for the
organization. The truth is that if you look all the way to the end and see all
of the depth of the change, that can be terrifying. But during the journey,
most people aren't even conscious of the change that happens in the months and
weeks it takes to get there. It happens more slowly and gradually. Honestly,
executives are, by and large, more comfortable with change. It's more about
managing it within the organization.
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