ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT You don’t have to be militant about it, just consistently respond that today is better that tomorrow, that right now is better than six hours from now. There’s a funny story about my old pal Sabih Khan, who worked in Operations at Apple when I was a product manager there. In 2008, he was meeting with Tim Cook about a production snafu in China. Tim said, “This is bad. Someone ought to get over there.” Thirty minutes went by and the conversation moved to other topics. Suddenly Tim looked back at Sabih and asked, ‘Why are you still here?’ Sabih letf the meeting immediately, drove directly to San Francisco Airport, got on the next lfight to China without even a change of clothes. But you can bet that problem was resolved fast. The candle is always burning. You need leadership to feel and infuse every discussion with that kind of urgency. Recognize and remove dependencies. Just as important as assigning a deadline, you need to tease out any dependencies around an action item. This might be obvious, but mission critical items should be absolutely gang tackled by your team in order to accelerate all downstream activities. Things that can wait till later need to wait. Ultimately, you can’t have team members slow- rolling on non-vital tasks when they could be hacking away at the due date for something that is make or break. A big part of this is making sure people aren’t waiting on one another to take next steps. The untrained mind has a weird way of defaulting to serial activities — i.e. I’ll do this atfer you do that atfer X, Y, Z happens. You want people working in parallel instead. A lot of people assume dependencies where they don’t even exist. How can you turn serial dependencies into parallel action? As a CEO, I insert myself at different points in a process to radically accelerate things. For example, if we’re coming up on an announcement and time is of the essence, I might jump in and just write the blog post myself. It’s not that my team couldn’t do it. I just know it would be faster since I’m the one who’s picky about the content anyway. As a leader, it’s your job to recognize the dependencies and non-dependencies, and take action depending on how critical the thing is and when it’s due. Ten times a day I’ll ifnd myself sitting in a meeting saying, “We don’t need to wait for that thing, we can do this now.” That thought is so common. It’s just that people need to say it out loud more otfen. 47