On value
A guide to what matters and what doesn't
The Intentional Manager — strategy, leadership and execution for the professional who wants to lead with intention, not just effort.
Picture a manager, competent, experienced and genuinely well-intentioned, who arrives at his Monday morning team meeting with a list of twelve priorities. By Friday, the team has made progress on nine of them, completed none and is already behind on next week’s list; nobody is slacking, everyone is exhausted. And yet, at the end of the quarter, there is very little to show for it.
The problem is that nobody has ever answered the question that everything else depends on: what does value actually mean for this team?
This series is built around six questions. Find the one you are stuck on and start there.
What even is value? Before ranking it, protecting it or fighting for it, you need a definition that holds up under pressure. Want to know if you are adding value? Ask a customer is where the framework begins.
How do I protect it day to day? A clear definition is useless if every meeting and every request quietly erodes it. Protecting value is a set of questions you can use to push back - without pushing people away.
How do I decide what comes first? When everything feels important, nothing is. The discipline of value is about ranking ruthlessly so that the compounding effect has something to work with.
What do I do when reality doesn’t cooperate? The ranking is a map, not a contract. The map is not the territory covers the questions that come up once you start applying it in a real organization with real politics.
What happens when someone pushes back? They will. Nobody gives up territory without a fight walks through a concrete conflict between two peers and the sequence of moves that resolves it.
How do I avoid the fight in the first place? Most of that friction is preventable. Nobody gives up territory without a fight — until they do is about the preparation that makes the conflict shorter, cheaper and, sometimes, unnecessary.
The list above will grow. The question in the first paragraph won’t change.
Luca