The Five Hats

This episode focuses on the secret to being a great and lazy CEO - knowing what to work on, only working on that, and getting rid of everything else. When I spread my effort across the whole organization, or we call it peanut buttering, your time across the business, it's not particularly useful because you haven't applied force in a significant way to one or two problems to really bust through them and get a great answer. You sort of neutralize all your effort by spreading it so thin.

You can think of this simply like a garden hose. So, you go out in your water, in your garden, and everybody knows what happens when you pull on the hose, you get a kink in the hose, and the kink in the hose stops the water from flowing. And if you think about the purpose of a hose, it's to flow water, right? That's the only real job it's got. So, it can't do its job because there's a kink in the hose. So your job as the waterer is to go find the kink and open it up, and then you get your flow rate back. Now, the same thing's true in your business. That's a system. It's a simple one. It's a hose, but your business is a system too.

But it's almost certain they're never going to open the kink and the hose if they just sort of work on the entire hose. A great CEO who's lazy, and doesn’t want to spend that much time working, says, I'm going to do this smart, I'm going to follow the hose, find the kink, and then I will get the performance I'm after. In other words, very specific and dedicated types of work to change the performance of the system. And that's what good CEOs do. And if you think about how a business grows, we've all seen these like scalloped curbs where it grows a while and then it gets flat, and then it grows a while, and then it gets flat.

That little flat spot is the kink coming into play. And until you resolve the kink, you don't get to grow again. When you see companies grow, then flatten out, grow, flatten out, that is because they're not being proactive and fixing the point of constraint from the kink before it comes into play. So how do you do this? In my book, Great CEOs Are Lazy, I talk about this idea of five hats, and these are the five hats that you should be thinking about wearing as a CEO when you're focused on the point of constraint. The first two hats are “find the kink” hats and the other three hats are “fix the kink” hats.

The hats are player, learner, architect, coach, and engineer. For details about each of the 5 hats, I hope you will enjoy this Episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast.