Simon Joliveau Breney

To put it in perspective: the font I first assumed was a peer to 1950s Helvetica was already of retirement age the day Helvetica was born. Gorton was older than Gill Sans, Futura, or Johnston’s London Underground font. It was contemporaneous to what today we recognize as the first modern sans serif font, Akzidenz-Grotesk, released but three years

The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol

is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way,

1. Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.


2. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short

A very basic three-category scale of Urgency could go something like this:

• “ASAP” represents the highest band of urgency. If we don’t deliver this ASAP, then the value (whatever total value that might be) will quickly evaporate – someone will get there before us or the opportunity (however big or small) will be massively impaired.

• “Soon”

4. Assume you are wrong. Human intuition is often wrong. To fight this, have a hypothesis and try to invalidate it quickly.

the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.