Leaders know what matters

This article is part of the Contemporary leadership series

“Attention is the chief bottleneck in organisational activity, and the bottleneck becomes narrower and narrower as we move to the top of organisations,” noted Herbert Simon, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. As we approach a new year, it’s a timely reminder that we all need to prioritise if we want to make an impact.

One of the founding fathers of the study of what we now call complex systems, Simon knew a thing or two about management and how organisations tick. He won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering research into their decision-making process. He was also one of the first scholars to bring a truly interdisciplinary approach to management, straddling economics, sociology and psychology. What Simon understood was that decision making in any complex system requires leaders to prioritise – to separate the organisational wheat from the chaff; to sort what matters from what does not.

Des Dearlove is co-founder of the Thinkers50. He is an Associate Fellow of Said Business School at Oxford University; an adjunct professor at IE Business School, where he taught the Strategic Communication Module on the International MBA; and the author of a bestselling study of the leadership style of Richard Branson. He has taught on the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme, and the Swarovski Academy in Switzerland, and teaches media skills and crisis management at Cranfield School of Management.

He is a former columnist to The Times, contributing editor to the American magazine Strategy+Business, and co-editor of the bestselling Financial Times Handbook of Management. His books available in more than 20 languages include Gravy Training and Generation Entrepreneur (co-authored with Stuart Crainer).