Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

Breaking Projects into Primary Elements

Besides being the leader, you need to be a teacher.

“I think that if you want to treat your work like a virus that will reach a lot of people,” Jonathan explained, “it’s good to package it in a way that can optimize the number of people it can reach, and that can mean different things. You can make something really, really palatable and turn it into an HBO miniseries or you can make something modera

start each Action Step with a verb:

Ideally, meetings should lead to ideas that are captured as Action Steps and then assigned to individuals together with deadlines.

Rather than invite consideration of change at any time, many creative teams set up periodic meetings throughout the development process called “challenge meetings.” In a challenge meeting, anyone is invited to ask and answer questions like “What doesn’t make sense with our current plan?” “What are we missing?” and “What should change?”

David Allen calls this the “two-minute rule”—if

“Shipping” is when you release something—when you

and should have taken place over e-mail.