Managing Change: Do one thing, do it very well and then move on

While it may be true that the only person who likes change is a wet baby, you can achieve consistent success no matter what your goal if you take the advice of Peter Bregman. In an October 2009 Harvard Business Review blog post, Bregman says you should focus 100% of your effort on the thing that’ll have the highest impact instead of trying to take on too much at once.

He’s absolutely right. In many of the organizations I’ve worked with over the years, my biggest successes came when I was able to get the team or person I was working with focused on one thing at a time. It doesn’t matter how large the list is – prioritizing and then tackling your change management tasks one at a time provides you with a way to divide what might be a huge undertaking into bite-sized chunks. Bregman used weight loss and a couple of other examples in his blog post and his point is pretty clear; this approach works for any type of project, not just change management.

Take Suze Orman, the incredibly successful personal finance guru. Back in 2006, Time ran an article about Orman titled “Staying Sharp: The Case for Doing One Thing at a Time“. In the article, Orman says she stays focused on a task until it’s completed and strongly feels that multitasking is “…the absolute ruination of the perfection of a project.” I did a Google search for “Suze Orman” and limited the time period to the past 24 hours. There were over 53,000 results. Somehow, I get the feeling this strategy is working for Suze in a big way.

There are many other examples of how well focusing on one thing at a time can work. Take Woot.com for example. They offer one deal a day until the item is sold out or until 11:59pm central time, when they replace the item. They’ve branched out from electronics only to crowdsourcing deals, wine, and stuff for kids – but each segment is served by a Website that focuses only on that one task. Ranked number 25 on Inc. Magazine’s list of fastest growing US companies, woot.com increased revenues from $2.3 million in 2004 to $164 million in 2008.

As Charles Emerson Winchester III of the 4077th MASH was fond of saying, “I do one thing, I do it very well and then I move on.”

Works for me.