How to Decide if a Business Issue is Worth Solving

Managing time is one of a CEO’s greatest challenges, but it’s not just their own time they are responsible for. One of a leader’s main responsibilities is setting a clear strategy for their organization, and good strategy is about making choices among competing priorities.

With finite resources and numerous problems to fix, organizations can become inefficient without clear direction. It’s the CEO’s job to provide that direction for the use of limited resources. 

But with issues, opportunities and initiatives popping up all the time, it’s not always easy to prioritize. Companies face issues in supply chain, marketing, product, quality, and entering new markets, to name a few. So how can a leader know which issues are most worth addressing?

As a business unit leader for Fortune 500 companies, I saw many scenarios where the leadership team needed to decide between competing priorities. Over time, I developed a series of questions to guide this decision-making—a rubric that I keep coming back to with my teams and with clients around the world.

These three revealing questions help clarify which business issues to address first and which aren’t worth the precious resources. While not a total replacement for a thorough analysis, they offer a framework leaders can use to compare and evaluate various issues and opportunities.

Read the rest of this article by Kevin Namaky at Fast Company where it first appeared.