The Top 5

One of our favourite entrepreneurial success stories comes from America. It was told most recently by Cameron Herold of BackpocketCOO at the MIT Entrepreneurial Masters Program earlier this year.

It is the story of a well-respected management consultant – Ivy Lee – and Charles M Schwab of Bethlehem Steel.

The lesson is about time management – something we all find difficult. How many of us regularly reach the end of a day, a week or a month and wonder where the time went, and why we didn’t achieve all the individual objectives we aimed for? Well this tale helps define the top priorities and how to focus on those issues rather than the other work that tends to take up most of our time.

One day Ivy Lee called on Schwab to sell his services. He ended with the statement: “With our service you’ll know how to manage better.” Schwab insisted he was managing as well as he knew how, and that what they needed was not more “knowing” but more “doing”. He said if Lee could provide a tool to pep them up to achieve the things they already knew they had to do, he would happily listen and pay anything he was asked.

“Fine,” said Lee. “I can give you something in 20 minutes that will step up your action and doing by at least 50%.” Schwab accepted the challenge. “I have just about that much time before I have to catch a train. What’s your idea?”

Lee gave Schwab a piece of blank card and asked him to write down the five most important tasks he had to do the next day. That took about three minutes. Next Lee asked Schwab to number them in order of importance. Five minutes later Lee said Schwab should keep the card and first thing next morning he should look at item one and start working on it.

Every 15 minutes, he said, Schwab was to look at the card and item one until it was finished. Then he should take the same approach with item two, then item three, until the working day was over.

“Don’t be concerned,” said Lee, “if you only finish two or three or even if you only finish one item. You’ll be working on the important ones. The others can wait.” He added: “If you can’t finish them all by this method you couldn’t with another method either, and without some system you’d probably not even decide which are most important.” Lee said Schwab should spend the last five minutes of each working day compiling a “must” list for the next day’s tasks. After Schwab was convinced of the worth of the system he should get his team to try it out.
“Try it out as long as you wish,” said Lee, “then send me a cheque for what you think it’s worth.”

The whole meeting lasted 25 minutes. Two weeks later Schwab sent Lee a cheque for $25,000 – a thousand dollars a minute. He added a note saying the lesson was the most profitable from a financial standpoint he had ever learned.

Did it work? In five years it turned the relatively unknown Bethlehem Steel Company into the biggest independent steel producer in the world, it made Schwab a hundred million dollar fortune and he was recognised as the best know steel man alive.

So. What’s your Top 5 list for tomorrow? Feel like sharing? Let us know how you get on.

It’s all part of The Transition Curve discussed on Norma’s blog.

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