rotmanmagazine.ca / 125using mobile phones and other digital devices. But in a clas-
sic case of Clay Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma, it held
back from developing digital cameras for the mass market,
because it feared that it would cannibalize its all-important
film business. Meanwhile, the Japanese company Canon
recognized the strategic priority presented by digital pho-
tography and rushed in.
Similarly, Finnish company Nokia developed the tech-
nology for smartphones earlier than most of its competitors
— yet it decided not to launch projects in this field and in-
stead, prioritized the exploitation of existing products. If it
had chosen different priorities, Nokia might still be one of
the leading telecom operators in the world.
If an executive team doesn’t clearly prioritize, middle
management and employees will do so, based on what they
think is best for the organization. At first, this might appear
to be a good practice: empowering people to make decisions
is something that has been heralded since the times of Peter
Drucker. The key is to have a clearly prioritized set of strate-
gic objectives to work from.
To illustrate, let’s look at a real-life example. ‘Sam’
worked as a teller in a local bank, serving customers. He
loved his job. His father had also spent his entire career in
the same bank. But like many other banks, this one was
struggling to survive due to low interest rates, increased
competition and the burden of cumbersome regulation.
The executive team worked for months to identify a newPrioritizing is usually seen as an individ-
ual skill that some are good at, others not
so much. We prioritize whenever we think
about how we will spend our time today,
this week, this month — or this year. But
the fact is, prioritizing is also a key orga-
nizational capability. Indeed, how and why organizations
prioritize their activities is vital to their success. Yet, surpris-
ingly, this is one of the least understood and most neglected
areas of organizational life.
The word priority appears in the English language as
early as the 14th century. The Merriam Webster dictionary
defines it as, ‘what matters most.’ In organizational terms,
prioritization sets the agenda in terms of what really matters,
which is reflected in how resources are allocated — especial-
ly the scarcest resources: Time and money.
Based on 20-plus years of executive experience with
large corporations including GlaxoSmithKline and Price-
waterhouseCoopers, I have found that one of the main
reasons companies fail in this area is that they lack a clear
sense of what is truly urgent and simply select the wrong pri-
orities. The results can be calamitous, as evidenced by two
classic corporate failures of recent times.
In the case of Kodak, it wasn’t that it didn’t foresee
the rise of digital photography, but that it chose to prioritize
the wrong things. In the 1990s, Kodak invested billions of
dollars into developing technology for taking photographs
Get Your Priorities
Straight: The Hierarchy
of Purpose
POINT OF VIEW Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, GlaxoSmithKline/Duke University