Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions

by Harry Max, Luke Hohmann (Foreword by)

Overview

"Because time, attention, and resources are finite, wise prioritization lies at the heart of any flourishing organization or meaningful life. Yet there's surprisingly little actionable advice on how to do it well—and many seductive reasons to avoid it entirely. This approachable, psychologically astute, and deeply practical book has the potential to change all that. Reading it is well worth your time."
—Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Managing Priorities is your guide to prioritizing anything—anytime and anywhere. Harry Max digs into the best practices for prioritization at Apple, DreamWorks, NASA, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and beyond, and brings them together in a single, practical method that you can apply step by step.

Who Should Read This Book?

Every business person who is even remotely interested in prioritization should read Managing Priorities. Whatever you need to prioritize—tasks, goals, OKRs, projects—this book is for you. Specific chapters are dedicated to what needs to happen and when for individuals, teams, and whole organizations.

Takeaways

• Learn what prioritization is.
• Gain insight into the costs of not prioritizing intentionally.
• Explore different methods of prioritization, including the Eisenhower Matrix, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the Max Priorities Pyramid, Paired Comparison, Stack Ranking, and more (highlighted in the Appendix).
• Apply the author's DEGAP® method of prioritization with its five phases: Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize.
• Identify, understand, and address your current state or lack of prioritization (the context of your problem, the people involved, and the issues surrounding timing).
• Use a scale to differentiate items to prioritize and arrange them appropriately.
• Select an approach to prioritization that works for your specific situation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781959029007
Publisher:	Rosenfeld Media
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	779,664
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

Harry Max is an executive player-coach, consultant, and hands-on product design and development leader with vision and a solid grasp of operations. A servant leader at heart, Harry works with senior leaders and their teams to help them realize their visions by zeroing in on pragmatic solutions to complex challenges.

Max’s experience includes having been a founder/CEO, operational leader, and strategy consultant with start-ups, innovators, and global brands, including Apple, Adobe, DreamWorks, Google, Hewlett-Packard, ITHAKA, Microsoft, PayPal, Rackspace, SGI, Symantec, and Yotascale. An early pioneer in e-commerce, Harry was a co-founder of Virtual Vineyards (wine.com), where his designs powered the interaction model behind the first usable and secure online shopping cart.

Harry Max is an autodidact. His undergraduate studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, focused on qualitative problem-solving and sociology. He is also an NLP Master Practitioner and a graduate of the Aspen Institute Technical Executive Leadership Initiative and Hoffman Institute. Max’s work has been featured internationally in the Economist, New York Times, TEDx, the Wall Street Journal, and a Harvard Business School case study. And lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Editorial Reviews

"Harry Max clearly lays out the steps that anyone can use to be more productive and effective. It's required reading for anyone wanting to be a better business leader."
—Marc Randolph, co-founder and first CEO of Netflix

"This book should be a mandatory part of all business curricula. The DEGAP strategy is applicable to all levels of management, from small businesses to corporate entities."
—Franchette Dyer, CEO of Vetech Business Services, LLC

"Because time, attention, and resources are finite, wise prioritization lies at the heart of any flourishing organization or meaningful life. Yet there's surprisingly little actionable advice on how to do it well—and many seductive reasons to avoid it entirely. This approachable, psychologically astute, and deeply practical book has the potential to change all that. Reading it is well worth your time."
—Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

"An indispensable guide to how, when and who decides what to get done."
—Maryann Kongovi, operations executive

"A forceful, clear, and detailed method for strengthening prioritization."
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2024-05-07
Max presents a variety of tools and tactics for making smarter business decisions in this guide.

The author, an executive coaching consultant, repeatedly stresses the importance of setting priorities in the business world: “If you don’t know your priorities,” he writes, “there’s no real engine that is driving your planning.” For companies and organizations, priorities are essential for survival, per Max, “but to thrive, their priorities must mesh like gears to synchronize the work that teams are planning and doing, so they can make progress consistently and predictably.” The author is aware of the frequency of distractions and time-sinks in the corporate world and the abundance of issues that are “urgent but not important.” In these pages, he offers strategies for clarifying priorities at various levels of significance. Most of these approaches employ a prioritization process model called DEGAP, consisting of five phases: Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, and, finally, Prioritize, which pulls all the earlier phases together. Max elaborates on all of these directives and provides further tools for sharpening the focus of prioritization, including the “Impact/Effort Matrix” and the “Situation Checklist,” the latter of which highlights circumstances in which prioritizing would be most essential, from launching a turnaround of some kind to scaling an operation up or down. Max writes with a tone of frank understanding that runs throughout the book, even when he’s recommending a very simple procedure, like making a to-do list: “Weirdly, the vast majority of people undervalue the power of a simple checklist for avoiding unintended negative consequences.” Readers feeling swamped by choices and competing calls for their attention will find the author’s consistent clarity of vision both refreshing and valuable—the techniques he outlines could untangle just about any institutional tangle. Max’s long experience is evident on every page.

A forceful, clear, and detailed method for strengthening prioritization.

Kirkus Reviews