Excellent question! Running an organisation really stretched my strategic thinking and ability to choose a coherent path through a lot of uncertainty. Your time, and the time of everyone who works for you, could be used on seemingly 100 different highly valuable things. Often you don’t have robust information to differentiate between these and decide which to prioritise, making it easy to try and do too many things simultaneously. I think one of the biggest lessons I learnt from MHI is being ruthless in prioritisation—choosing a very small number of things and doing these as well as possible. It’s easy to choose to 80⁄20 a whole lot of stuff instead that all seems necessary but in hindsight you could have, and should have, scrapped maybe 75% of it.
I’d like to think this is a skill I got a lot better at with time, and that this sort of strategic thinking and prioritisation applies to almost any kind of role—e.g. it’s a big emphasis for me at the moment in thinking about the many different ways AIM can look to recruit and selecting a few key avenues to execute.
Excellent question! Running an organisation really stretched my strategic thinking and ability to choose a coherent path through a lot of uncertainty. Your time, and the time of everyone who works for you, could be used on seemingly 100 different highly valuable things. Often you don’t have robust information to differentiate between these and decide which to prioritise, making it easy to try and do too many things simultaneously. I think one of the biggest lessons I learnt from MHI is being ruthless in prioritisation—choosing a very small number of things and doing these as well as possible. It’s easy to choose to 80⁄20 a whole lot of stuff instead that all seems necessary but in hindsight you could have, and should have, scrapped maybe 75% of it.
I’d like to think this is a skill I got a lot better at with time, and that this sort of strategic thinking and prioritisation applies to almost any kind of role—e.g. it’s a big emphasis for me at the moment in thinking about the many different ways AIM can look to recruit and selecting a few key avenues to execute.