The #1 metric that determines your future success

Introducing Nat and Sam

Meet Nat. Natalie or Nathaniel, as you prefer. Nat is an organised and disciplined executive with a large scope of responsibility, and is known for solving problems and creating results. Highly competent, Nat is known to be a safe pair of hands.

However, Nat is crazy-busy. Their days are packed with various operational reviews, project updates and meetings. Their inbox is bulging with requests from across the business, and they’re swamped.

They’re making progress, but it’s taking a toll and they just can’t seem to free themselves up to work on some of the big ideas and initiatives that they’d like to put their attention on: there’s just too many urgent issues to be addressed. They keep telling themselves, “It’ll calm down in a few weeks after this project or after that event,” but it never does.

Nat’s on the “hamster wheel” of operations and it seems impossible to get off.

Now meet Sam. Samantha or Samuel, as you prefer.

Sam seems to be more relaxed and less overworked than Nat - but their results are incredibly good. Sam’s working hard, but they’re not swamped by the whirlwind of operational demands. Busy but not over-busy.

Somehow, they’re managing to find time to really progress some major organisational change initiatives and the “important but non-urgent” stuff. As a result, Sam’s organisation is really breaking new ground. 

Sam’s on a “flywheel” - momentum is building and building, because they’re able to invest time in more strategic activities. As a result, their organisation is levelling-up and their personal impact seems to be accelerating.

Two strategies, two worlds

Nat and Sam are fictional, but I see their stories time and again in my work with CEOs and senior execs. They represent the logical outcome of two different strategies to delivering results.

The “Nat approach” is to work harder, take on more projects, solve more problems and address more customer demands. The problem is you rapidly hit the “ceiling of complexity” where there’s no more hours in the day and you’re wearing yourself ragged.

You USE your time.

The “Sam approach” is to shift up a gear. Instead of solving this month’s/quarter’s issues, work on different problems and projects, the things that will make next month/quarter/year/decade far more manageable and impactful.

You INVEST your time.

For the financially minded among you, I describe this as an “opex/capex” issue.

• The first approach (Nat) is “opex” - you’re spending your time on tasks that need to be done, but those same tasks are basically going to reoccur.
• The second approach (Sam) is “capex” - you invest time now to create a permanent improvement in future.

Opex is “working at McDonalds”. Capex is studying so you can “run a McDonalds”. Opex is “buying a McDonalds burger”. Capex is “saving so you can buy a McDonalds franchise.”

Opex is solving short term needs. Capex is creating long-term impact.

The #1 metric that determines your future success

So with that in mind, I suggest that the #1 metric that determines your future success is:

The hours in your week working on the “up-levelling” projects that’ll put you and your team in a far better place to deliver on your operational goals in the future.

In a word, margin. 

Margin for strategic activity. These are “up-levelling” projects that eliminate risk, overcome bottlenecks, or build new capabilities in the business.

When I joined Cisco, the team was in “Nat” mode: seen as solid and dependable, doing their job but not really moving things forward. We decided, as a leadership team, to extract our group from a lot of the lower-level activities that people had come to depend on us for, and replace them with fewer and more impactful engagements.

This involved a real effort, and building systems and processes that didn’t exist before, but the outcome was that we managed to keep our existing stakeholders satisfied AND create a whole level of impact by serving a new set of stakeholders - all the way to Cisco’s CEO.

This was a true “Nat” to “Sam” journey, and I’ll tell you later on more about the key moves we had to make to ensure success.

But how do you get from A to B?

However, if you’re already running fast, how do you make time to create that margin? Next time, I’ll show you how you can start to solve that problem.

In the meantime, if you know any “Nats” you might like to recommend they follow along with this material by subscribing to my free email course "Freeing Yourself Up For Strategic Activities (An Executive's Guide)".