The men’s book club at our church takes a hiatus over summer, however they do recommend a list of publications and ask that each person read one of the selections over the break. The book I chose was, to say the least, a grind to read. The author is widely known as a HIGHLY intelligent scholar, however his writing style isn’t anything like mine, nor is it similar to the books that I really dive into and enjoy. This particular writer tended to jump around a bit and often repeated himself over and over. There were a lot of redundancies and the book didn’t have much flow to it. Great content that could’ve been shared in half as many pages, which is what brings us to this week’s Huddle Up topic…..
Back in my school days, it was common to pick up the Cliff’s Notes for whatever piece of literature you were studying. Shakespear? Get the Cliff’s Notes. Catcher in the Rye? Get the Cliff’s Notes. Heck, today you can even get Notes for subjects like calculus.
If you are not familiar with Cliff’s Notes, they are short synopses of a given subject matter. They could be focused on a piece of literature (which is where the company started), a play, or a study guide for a specific subject. Basically, Cliff’s Notes were a way to get up to speed on a topic MUCH faster than diving into the subject matter itself. You can read the Notes for Romeo and Juliet and in no time get the overall gist of what the play is all about. While these study guides were originally meant to be complimentary to the subject at hand, many students used them as a substitute for learning the content itself.
Going back to my summer reading. I honestly could have learned the author’s position on his theology with a short summary. A Cliff’s Notes version of his book would have been just fine, and honestly, more effective. Which made me think…..
How often do we serve up a large amount of information, when a shorter (Cliff’s Notes) version would suffice?
We often see that mission and vision statements are long dragged out paragraphs that in the end, could be two sentences or less. This happens in goals setting and defining key performance indicators (or KPIs) as well. If you can’t pinpoint what success looks like, in a way that everyone reading it can understand it AND regurgitate it, it’s too long.
When I arrived back in Arizona to take over the Phoenix regional Sports Commission we had just such an identity problem. Not only did the community not know what success looked like for our organization, our people within the sports commission didn’t either. So we scrapped everything and started over. The new mission statement was something like this…..
“We enrich our community through sport and we do so in three ways:
Driving economic impact through hosting events.
Recognizing athletic achievement through the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame.
Giving underserved youth access to sporting opportunities.”
Period. That was it. A statement and three executable elements that support it.
Over time, this simple message became second nature for our board members and our community stakeholders. Yes, each year we had specific goals for our three mission “pillars,” however the basics in our playbook remained the same over time.
So today’s takeaway is this – What are your Cliffs Notes? What message do you want to portray and how narrow can you boil it down so others can consume it, and later, share it?
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