We have finally arrived at the transition from ‘leadership’ to ‘management.’ Back in parts I-IV we talked about ‘Personal Leadership.’ That was all about your Ultimate Mission and Grand Strategy, Roles or Identities, “Sharpening the Saw,” and finding your purpose, values, character strengths, principles, and virtues.
- Part I: From Management to Leadership With Your Personal Credo
- Part II: Exercises and Practices
- Part III: Roles and Identities
- Part IV: The Ultimate Mission and Grand Strategy
So parts one through four are all the high-level strategy, purpose, and meaning stuff: are we climbing the right mountain? Are we on the right road to the right goals for our Ultimate Purpose?
Personal Management is all about day-to-day actions taken to accomplish your high-level strategies—the actions in service to your purpose. What you want to be is all for naught if you don’t work on it consistently.
Wish in one hand and shit in the other; see which one fills up first.
Jack Cagle
Put a different way:
A vision without a task is but a dream. A task without a vision is drudgery. A vision and a task are the hope of the world.
Inscription on a church wall in Sussex England, c. 1730
Strategies or Tactics? Both, Actually
The terms ’strategy’ and ‘tactics’ come from military terminology as far back as Sun Tzu’s Art of War. They’ve been adapted to fit different usages such as business strategy.
Have you ever gone to the grocery store without a list or plan? Then tried to fix meals for the next week with a random assortment of groceries? There were probably things you needed but forgot to get, and maybe things you didn’t need that went to waste later that week. Meal planning and a grocery list is a strategy; shopping is the tactic.
Strategy
A strategy is an action plan that you will take in the future to achieve an end. These help you define your long-term goals and how you will achieve a goal. Strategy is the big-picture thinking.
Tactics
Tactics are the individual steps and actions that will get you where the strategy—the action plan or leader’s intent—wants you to go. Tactics zoom in on the nitty-gritty, dealing with the day-to-day operational and short-term objectives. They encompass concrete steps—the how-to steps to turn your overall plan into reality.
All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Sun Tzu illustrates that while tactics are more concrete and easier to see, an overarching strategy is equally important. The question should not be strategy versus tactics, but strategy and tactics. These are two sides of the same coin—both are necessary.
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The point is, before getting deep into the tactical weeds, clarify our strategy.
If you’ve been following along in parts I through IV, you will have developed your Grand Strategy and Domain Strategies. Strategy for projects and training missions are similar. Furthermore, these should be in alignment with your domain and grand strategy.
With strategy in place, you can learn, develop, or adopt tactics to achieve the leader’s (your) intent. These become your best practices to accomplish your strategic goal. You are using tactics when conducting actions on ‘the target’—your strategic goal. When in doubt as to the next actions or priorities, return to your strategies. From there re-orient, and re-engage. More specifics about this to follow in Parts VI and VII.
What Else?
One of the reasons I have delayed so long in drafting this second half—Personal Management—is that my methods have recently changed. Somewhat drastically. I wasn’t certain that my past or current methods would be useful to my audience. I decided that while specific methods may or may not be useful, the principles could be.
Methods are many. Principles are few. Methods may change, but principles never do.
Apocrypha
Therefore, we will talk a lot about principles and some about ‘best practices.’ Somewhat less about methods. I’ll use my own situation to explain my changes. In due course, I’ll also illustrate old and new methods that you may (or may not) find useful.
Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.
Bruce Lee
There are many ‘ways’ that might fit your needs and personality and many that might not. Beyond the principles, this workflow should be organic—evolving to your idiosyncrasies.
Starting with Part VI, I’ll walk through my current system with a focus on principles. That is, why my system is my way. I’ll talk also about my current methods. Furthermore, I’ll pepper in past methods you may find helpful, and explain why they worked ‘then’ and why they don’t work ‘now.’
In Part VI we will start with an overview of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. For all of its simplicity, and despite all of its critics, it has been at the core of my system for 20-plus years. When I first stumbled upon it, it just fit. We will take a deeper dive into some of the particulars: “collect,” “process,” “organize,” and “review.” I’ll clarify as best I can my spin on these core principles.
Using “Organize” to segue, in Part VII we will return to Stephen Covey—his “role-based goals.” With these we will develop a “weekly attack plan” and daily planning. Here, too, we will discuss context- and time- (calendar) based lists, and how these merge into the weekly planning.
Next, in Part VIII, we will talk about projects and David Allen’s “Natural Planning Model.” The name is his, but he readily admits he didn’t invent the method. He merely details how the brain naturally works and scales that up. Part VIII is where we will also talk about “Training Missions” and the benefits of a “Personal Lab Notebook.”
Lastly, in Part IX, I’ll explain how I use Tiago Forte’s “second brain” system for my reference and project files. Finally, I’ll also describe any tools—analog and digital—that I haven’t elsewhere described. Some people get hung up on tools and bounce from one shiny new app to another. Truth is, once you know the principles, any tool will work.
That should be enough to map out our way forward. See you soon for Part VI.
