We had business review at Chefparade last week which brought lots of learnings and ideas. Clearly, we can’t pursue all of them. So how do we know which idea to pursue and which to forget?

With every idea we go through 3 filters:
i) strategy
We need to know who we are as company, where we go and what we do.
Then all that doesn’t fit this we will not do.
Sometimes it is very tempting, but it always proved to be good decision not to do something. We have many ideas from within and outside our company for new project and new businesses.
Most of the time we don’t do it because when we really think about it, the only reason why we would do it would be money. And that is not good enough.

ii) difficulty vs impact
All ideas you have you can put into four categories based on their difficulty to execute and the impact they have. You can have ideas with little or big impact that are easy or difficult to execute.
We always start with ideas that are easy to execute and have big impact.
Then we go for easy execution little impact.
Only after that we start with more complex ideas with big reward.
As you might guess, we don’t go for difficult to execute ideas with little impact.

iii) capacity
Once we identified what to do, the hard part comes – who will do it.
I like my people to be stretched, but only to the point that brings best out of them, not further. That means, sometimes we have great idea but we don’t go for it as we don’t have nobody to work on it and it’s not big enough to hire new person.

Related posts: To Do or Not To Do; Use What You Already Have