70% Success Rate

A rule with a number in it is a promise. 70% Success Rate promises that if you respect the figure, the figure will respect you.

The number is a fence. On one side lies intention, on the other side lies habit. Most of us live on the wrong side and write poetry about it. This rule simply asks you to climb the fence.

The idea is simple, and like most simple ideas it is easy to nod at and hard to use. The nod is free. The use costs attention, every day, in small change.

Consider the wedding caterer. Fifty dishes, three hundred guests, one small kitchen. He does not motivate his crew with speeches; he sequences the work so that nobody is ever waiting on anybody.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Carry it lightly. Ideas, like umbrellas, are useful only when actually opened.