*1Thing* Impact Metric
When Peter Thiel was running PayPal he insisted that every employee have 1 focus. Not 3 priorities. Not 10 items on their job description. One. After all, if you are focusing on everything you are focused on nothing. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative. The annual review required each employee to identify their single most valuable contribution to the company.
Compare that to impact metrics.
As a non-profit or mission driven business you are expected to improve income for women, reduce co2, reduce child mortality all while standing on one leg. You just can’t be good at all of those things. The focus can’t be all of those things.
The solution is *1Thing* Impact metrics. Choose one thing you want to focus on and do it well.
Apply that discipline to your staff as well. If they have three priorities and 1 is hard but really important, guess which one they are going to focus on? Not the hard but important one.
Common objections:
- But we really are working on a lot of different things.
- What if we make child mortality go down but increase co2 in the process?
Answers:
- Let’s take an example: My mom’s non-profit, Orion Communities, does numerous things: helps single mothers, provides kids with computers, gives people fresh out of jail bus tokens so they can get to work and helps families keep the gas on so they don’t freeze in the winter. But she has 1Thing: They help people falling between the cracks. Sometimes it’s a big help; sometimes it’s giving a tie-dyed shirt to a homeless man on his birthday. Sometimes it’s a big crack; sometimes one week of bus tokens avoids adding one more person to the recidivism statistic.
- What ever you do will have unintended consequences. You’re human. And you don’t know what you don’t know. No amount of measuring things will solve that — there will always be more more thing you could measure.
The overhead of measuring lots of things is suffocating. If a funder wants you to keep track of 20 different metrics don’t. Mostly funders don’t care what the metrics are anyways. They just want to look good or feel good, neither of which require numbers.
How to choose 1Thing
- It should be something that is easy to measure.
- It should be something customer facing. At the R&D stage it might be number of customer interviews. At the scaling stage it might be number of customers purchasing, etc. This case study from DFID is actually pretty good.
- It should be hard to spoof. Recently a funder asked us to increase the number of people we impacted from 2,000 to 10,000. Sure, I can do that. If I give 8,000 people a stick of gum I have now impacted them. If your metric is trees saved lots of extrapolation is required making it easy to spoof.
Your 1Thing isn’t going to be perfect and never will. But it’s not fixed. You can evolve. Your organization is a living organism. And if it’s not changing and evolving then it’s dying. But at any given time you can only have one focus. With a focus on 1Thing you can focus on climbing Mount Everest and then focus on swimming across the English Channel. But you can’t focus on both at the same time.
There was something incredibly special about PayPal. Even though no one became a billionaire from it’s 2002 sale to ebay, 6 members went on to become billionaires. Former PayPal employees went on to found Kiva.org, Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, Yammer, 500 Startups, Founders Fund and many others.
1Thing works.
