1 in 60 rule

Numbers are impatient teachers. 1 in 60 rule gives you the figure first and the explanation later. That is usually the right order.

Strip away the number and the idea is this: life punishes vagueness. A figure forces you to say exactly how much, exactly when, exactly who. Once you have said it, the work is half done, because the argument is now with reality and not with your mood.

What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.

Consider the wedding caterer. Fifty dishes, three hundred guests, one small kitchen. He does not motivate his crew with speeches; he sequences the work so that nobody is ever waiting on anybody.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Carry it lightly. Ideas, like umbrellas, are useful only when actually opened.