A CEO Manage to Lead participant put it this way:

“It’s easy to make great progress when you aren’t doing much in the first place,”

when commenting on the lift in performance experienced after tweaking the approach to running his organization’s weekly Operating Meeting.

The motivation was to stop wasting countless hours discussing philosophical and theoretical matters that had little-to-nothing to do with operations and that kept them from getting important work done in their operating meeting up to that point.

The point of his Haiku-like phrase is that it is not hard to run an organization better…but you do have to work at it.

Every meeting needs to be thought through to get clear why it is being held, what it is to produce, how it will be accomplished, and what outcomes are to be generated (see: How to Run a Great Meeting).

A good approach for Operating Meetings is for the organization’s leader (e.g., CEO, unit leader, initiative leader, project manager, etc.) to have each functional leader (e.g., head of engineering, head of marketing, etc.) present in literally just a few minutes: