Murder Your Darlings: Focus on What Truly Matters
This is advice given by experienced writers to get rid of an unnecessary storyline, character, or sentence in a piece of creative writing. Itโs simple to understand but very difficult to implement. Because you work hard on that creative writing piece. You research, strategize, coin new quotes and then itโs expected that you remove those for the sake of the overall story.
I guess, this is not only applicable to writing but itโs equally applicable to the business world.
When the new year starts, every organization goes through strategy meetings, multiple rounds of discussions, huddle meetings, and various presentations, excel charts (nowadays Power BI dashboards), doing SWOT analysis, defining new KRAs/ KPIs and so on.
But we all know how much we could actually implement throughout the year !! And why that fails is simply because, many times strategies are designed by someone at the top with lots of assumptions and overreliance on the execution team. In todayโs uncertain world, things keep changing and we go back to our own world that we are familiar with. Year after year.
๐๐ผ๐ป๐ณ๐ถ๐ฟ๐บ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐๐ถ๐ฎ๐ also explains the same phenomenon. We filter out any new information that contradicts our existing theories, beliefs and understandings. Warren Buffet said, โ๐๐ฉ๐ข๐ต ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐ฉ๐ถ๐ฎ๐ข๐ฏ ๐ฃ๐ฆ๐ช๐ฏ๐จ ๐ช๐ด ๐ฃ๐ฆ๐ด๐ต ๐ข๐ต ๐ฅ๐ฐ๐ช๐ฏ๐จ, ๐ช๐ด ๐ช๐ฏ๐ต๐ฆ๐ณ๐ฑ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ต๐ช๐ฏ๐จ ๐ข๐ญ๐ญ ๐ฏ๐ฆ๐ธ ๐ช๐ฏ๐ง๐ฐ๐ณ๐ฎ๐ข๐ต๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ ๐ด๐ฐ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ข๐ต ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ๐ช๐ณ ๐ฑ๐ณ๐ช๐ฐ๐ณ ๐ค๐ฐ๐ฏ๐ค๐ญ๐ถ๐ด๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ๐ด ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ฎ๐ข๐ช๐ฏ ๐ช๐ฏ๐ต๐ข๐ค๐ต.โ We keep searching for support or proof to substantiate our beliefs.
Preparing strategy is good but execution of strategy is difficult. We spend enormous time in strategizing but lack the skill of executing it to perfection. We donโt want to challenge ourselves to do different or out of the box things, to avoid failures and look bad in our management eyes. In fact, there is no KRA defined for experimenting failures.
Itโs important then to murder all other wish list items, irrespective of how much we love them, and focus on the most important, very few goals for perfect execution. ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐.
