Activity versus Accomplishment

Posted by Jaan on March 2nd, 2011 | Add your comment

On my last cross-Atlantic flight I looked through the “Posts to write” draft folder. What a read! I ended up deleting 95% of notes, mostly because the subject matter was no longer relevant or interesting.

Here’s one I decided to finish up based on conversations I’d had earlier in the week. It tackles a problem companies of all sizes, and on both sides of the Atlantic, can suffer from.

This post might also make it in to a future revised version of Noded.

The two concepts of activity and accomplishment are polar opposites. Yet they are often confused with one another and companies suffer for it.

Activity

Activity is what people engage in when they want to look busy instead of actually accomplishing things. Activity is what a certain type of managers like to see, as in “I like to see people working”. The same managers tend to under-value true accomplishment.

Activity is what people who like to play office politics and power-play do. They use activity to own the mindshare of a department or company. They cause enough activity to force other people to react to it with activities of their own, usually to address something inconsequential.

If enough activity is generated, regardless of how ridiculous, some of it will become the companies new baseline simply because there is no time to address all issues the zero-value activities create. And thus slowly the company begins to die, thinking all the activity going on accomplishes something.

Accomplishment

Accomplishment solves challenges. It improves, elevates and moves a product or company forward. It inspires people, it makes today a heck of a lot better than yesterday. Accomplishment is what you want and need, it is the only thing that matters.

Conclusion

Just as it takes more words to explain the evils of activity, it is easy to understand and aspire to accomplish. Spread the word.

Thank you to my colleague @spencerchen for helping me make sense of my unarticulated thoughts on this subject by setting them in the context of ‘activity v. accomplishment’.