This is Issue 04 of The Founder's Briefing — my monthly newsletter for founders and leadership teams running on EOS®. If you'd rather get it in your inbox, the signup lives on this site.
The eleven-Rock® whiteboard.
The whiteboard in his Sorrento Valley conference room had eleven Rocks® on it. He read them to me like a man proud of how much he could carry. Eleven for the quarter. The leadership team had nodded along in the room because nobody wants to be the one who says no to a good idea. Good ideas aren't the problem. Too many good ideas are. By week three nobody could tell me which Rock® mattered most, because the honest answer was "all of them," which is the same as "none of them." I've watched this in Carlsbad, in La Jolla, on a Zoom with a team down in Chula Vista. The list grows because adding feels like leadership and cutting feels like failure. It isn't. The teams I trust most walk out of the quarterly with a shorter list than they walked in with. They argue about what to remove, out loud, in the room, and that argument is the actual work. Eleven Rocks® isn't ambition. It's an unmade decision wearing ambition's clothes.
Three Rocks®, nowhere to hide.
Watch what actually happens with eleven Rocks®. The team doesn't finish eleven. They finish four, half-finish three, and quietly forget the rest by week six. Then they walk into the next quarterly carrying guilt instead of momentum. Now watch a team with three. Every Level 10®, those three have nowhere to hide. When one is off-track the whole room sees it, because there's room to see it. Completion goes up, not because the team got better, but because the list got honest. Rocks® aren't a wish list for the quarter. They're the two or three things that, if you did nothing else, would still make the ninety days a win. Everything past that number isn't a Rock®. It's a to-do you haven't been brave enough to schedule or kill.
The Leadership Question
If you could keep only three Rocks® this quarter and had to drop the rest today, which three survive? And the harder half: who on your team already knows the answer and is waiting for you to say it first? You don't need a planning session to find out. You need ten quiet minutes and the willingness to disappoint a few good ideas.
Resource: Essentialism by Greg McKeown
I keep Essentialism next to Traction®, not on top of it. The line that stuck with me: "If it isn't a clear yes, it's a clear no." Subtraction is a skill that decays. Left alone, every list grows. The whole book is one argument made well: the disciplined pursuit of less is what protects the work that matters. Nothing on my shelf pairs with Rocks® better.
Two numbers tell the whole story: how many Rocks® your leadership team set last quarter, and how many actually got done. If the gap between those numbers bothers you, grab time with me and we'll close it.