Your company priority list is a lie

Does your company have a list of the top-three priorities for this quarter? How about top-five? Congratulations, you have a list of ideas, not priorities.

A priority can only be one thing

It's inspiring to come up with a list of Very Important Things The Business Must Accomplish This Quarter. Hold all-company meetings with whizzy PowerPoint. Print inspirational posters for people to tape to their screens.

You're lying to yourself.

When everything is important, nothing is important

Sooner or later your company is going to have to make trade-offs. Projects will crash into each other. Departments will have conflicting schedules. Unless everyone knows what's MOST important, lots of things will get partly done and your most important thing won't.

But we CAN'T make trade-offs

False. You WILL make trade-offs. The only question is whether you'll decide ahead of time what's most important or if you'll just let the teams fight it out and make the decision for you.

Your company priority list must be ranked

It does't matter if your list of company priorities has two items or three or twenty. What matters is ordering them. A list of priorities without an explicit order is just a list of things you'd maybe kinda sorta like to get done.

Something has to be number one.

Make painful choices before they become painful

If your business can't say that X is more important than Y, you need to dig deeper. Because at some point, X and Y ARE going to come into conflict. Either you have the hard conversations today, or you let entropy choose for you.

Don't let chaos decide what's most important for your business—put a specific order to any set of priorities.