Relevance: Hitting Your Goals by Knowing What Matters

2

GOALS, ASSUMPTIONS, AND THE EIGHT-LINE STRATEGY

Both loud and silent single shots can cause a death; but not the same death.

—Donald Davidson

This chapter shows how to construct the kind of testable performance strategies that are necessary, I believe, to learn from experience in today's information-overloaded organizations. The first section gives an overview of a method called eight-line strategies for distilling the strategy relevant to a manager at any level of a firm to a short list of critical assumptions. These assumptions lay the foundation for vastly simplified management reporting and performance reviews.

The next four sections flesh out the method with several rules of thumb:

• Devise short-term milestones—to make sure even long-term ...