Direction
Define the world you want to exist before you define your organization's mission or start shipping small deliveries: without that vision, teams will move in different directions and politics will decay all ability for innovation.
Strategic thinking for
Defining a clear strategy.
Initiatives
Run no more than three initiatives at once, only one of them an opportunity, and put your best people on that opportunity and on your biggest bottlenecks.
Measures
Most organizations use measures to hide from the exact accountability it is supposed to create. They optimize proxy-indicators to create the illusion of momentum and velocity, while the actual foundation rots.
Objectives
An Objective is a goal with a clearly defined end state. It has a measurable outcome and/or change in output. Without an objective, teams measure motion instead of progress.
Projects
Connect daily work to larger goals with projects
All projects and work should directly correlate to strategic goals.
Goldratt's Theory of Constraints
A system's throughput is limited by its bottleneck. Improving anything else does not improve the system.
Set strategic product initiatives
Ambitious goals are the only way to make a significant impact.
Amazon’s Fulfillment Collapse (1999–2002)
In 1999 Amazon nearly died from its own success—then Bezos put his best people on the warehouse bottleneck, and Prime became possible.