George B. Thomas explains how senior leaders often chase urgent problems instead of high-impact ones. He uses a trial conversion rate example to show what happens when you prioritize the wrong issues.
With all of my senior leaders, we talk every single week about how they're allocating their hours against the roles and responsibilities in terms of what they thought they were going to do. And if it's out of whack, does it make sense? I'll give you a good example. Right off the pages of yesterday's newsprint, all of a sudden, someone was spending a lot of effort on this issue. And I'm like, but this issue, if you really do the math on it, it's on our trials, right? So our trials are off a little bit, and we're focused on, like, trying to figure out what the heck's going on. And so they're off, like 15%. But the group that they're off on is a low conversion rate group. So the group they're off on has a conversion rate of 20%. So 15% of 20% is 3%. It's like, I don't want you spending too much effort on this issue. It's an issue. Yeah, we're going to fix it. Yeah. But don't put one of your rocks for the quarter in harm's way.
