Leadership Blog

There is the classic sales technique called “reduction to the ridiculous”, whereby the cost of the item being offered for sale (or the premium above a competitor’s offering) is framed in terms of the cost of a daily cup of coffee. For example:

“Yes, it does cost $500 more, but if you think about all the benefits you get, over a year it works out to less than $1.50 a day, less than your daily coffee at the coffee shop. Surely you can afford an extra $1.50 a day.” Well maybe. But don’t ask me to sacrifice my coffee!

On the other hand, if we take the concept (a big thing made up of tiny pieces) and apply it to goal setting and target achievement, then it becomes a useful tool when undertaking an ambitious objective. It allows you to improve your odds of success by defining and executing against a series of smaller steps or goals.

Take your professional development, for example. Especially in today’s competitive environment, what are you doing to learn/strengthen a business skill? Let’s say there’s a business leadership book that has been recommended to you, but you feel there’s no time in your day to read - you’re too busy.

Two skills come into play - prioritization and time management. First, is reading the book important to you? Assuming the answer is yes, then a revisiting and re-prioritizing of some daily habits is in order. Then we can reduce reading “the Big Book” into a smaller, more readily achievable goal of daily reading i.e. Reduction to the Achievable.

A typical business book can be 20 chapters and 400 pages. If you read the daily newspaper, do you think you could forgo reading one section of the daily newspaper and read ten pages of a book instead? In six weeks with a daily reading habit, one book is complete, and, with your new revised reading habit, you have created the possibility of reading another 5-6 books within a year.

Or if you are commuting, rather than listening to headline news on the radio, how about listening to the audio version of the book? Or find podcasts of topics in your field of interest and download them to your MP3 player for playback on the drive to work.

The key elements of success are (with the example of reading a book):

- define your goal (Read a book in every six weeks)
- make sure its completion has an emotional payoff (I’ll be more knowledgeable, more current, more valuable)
- break the project into smaller, well defined, achievable, measurable goals (10 pages every day)
- take a moment to congratulate yourself on completion of each of the smaller goals (Yay! I completed a chapter and I learned something new)

Look at a project that is important to you that you have been postponing because it seems too big. Use the technique of “Reduction to the Achievable” to break through your procrastination and get started.