100 Ways to Motivate Others

Chapter 22. Know Your Purpose

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

—Peter F. Drucker

It is hard to motivate others if you don’t have time to talk to them. There are fewer discouraging sights than a human chicken running around with his head cut off—and not enough time to find it.

Managers whose teams are not performing up to expectations are simply doing ineffective things all day. Rather than stopping and deciding what would be the right thing to do, they do the wrong things faster and faster. Then they stress out over the “workload.” (There is no “workload” to worry about if you are doing the right thing. There is only that thing.)

And as corporate time-management specialist David Allen says ...