Too busy to read?

So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don't act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.

when a request would come in he would pause and evaluate the request against a tougher criteria: "Is this the very most important thing I should be doing with my time and resources right now?"

They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.

Remember, zombie projects are low-value projects that nevertheless consume time, energy, and money. Killing them helps reduce neglected work and allows you to deliver more important projects faster and with fewer interruptions.

Sometimes it is better to do a bad job of measuring something important than a good job of measuring something irrelevant.

Effective management is putting first things first. While leadership decides what "first things" are, it is management that puts them first, day-by-day, moment-by-moment. Management is discipline, carrying it out.

the executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done. And this is simply saying that he is expected to be effective.