Matrix

There are different opinions about management. Some people believe that management is a path through chaos. Others say it is sorting out chaos. Still others say it is all about creating chaos…

During World War II, one of the better commanders, General Eisenhower (I like Patton better though), stated on the front lines that he had to somehow control all the battlefield chaos. Everyone is important, all matters are urgent and the enemy is not sleeping … By the way, is it familiar? Eventually he invented the simplest command system in the world – Eisenhower Matrix. The system was that: all cases, before they appeared on his desk, or rather on the command’s table, had to be judged important / unimportant; urgent / not urgent way. The procedure was as follows: 1) throw all unimportant / non-urgent matters straight into the trash; 2) we pass on the important / not urgent ones to war analysts; 3) unimportant and urgent matters, we hand pass over to junior officers for training (any errors will be low cost the outcome of the battle); 4) important / urgent issues are those ones that we deal with high priority.

From the perspective of wartime conditions, adopting such a procedure makes sense. However, taking the so-called business environment, however, some priorities should be changed. 1) all unimportant / non-urgent matters should be thrown also to the trash – there is no difference here; 2) we pass important / not urgent issues to business analysts and later on, we will deal with them personally; 3) unimportant / urgent, we pass them on to students for training (also here, any mistakes will be harmless to the company, and young people have to practice managerial roles somewhere, right?); 4) important / urgent issues are topics that require not so much a quick solution, although we really must act, we have to make a quick decision by turning on “the crisis management” mode, but rather we need a reflection on our poor corporate management system. In every business, there is no such thing as “important and urgent” issues. All important problems take time to be professionally resolved. You and your organization should prepare for them, think about them, and discuss them. It takes time and effort. If it happens, you have to do something about yourself and/or your management system.

By the way, the best indicator of the poor quality of management is a large number of important and urgent matters waiting to be solved. If this is what is happening in your company, think about a transfer… Probably this type of company and management board is simply irreformable! Don’t waste your time. Anyway, there is nothing that you can do. We talk about basic business skills here. Don’t we?