Make Rules and Limits Work for You

Even for those who aim to think “outside the box,” rules and constraints aren’t always bad. They focus our thinking and remind us to be deliberate with our execution by keeping our goal in mind. So in order to thrive in a landscape characterized by unmade decisions, it’s critical to be thoughtful about what rules we create and how they might guide our choices down the road.

At her recent DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar talk, Stanford Management Science & Engineering Professor Kathleen Eisenhardt drew on the principles from her new book, Simple Rules, on how heuristics are crafted. In the video below, we see how rule formation guides a multinational company through an uncertain future in a responsible manner:

Not only do rules inform intelligent choices about the way we do business, they also provide us with constraints, which, as David Heinemeier Hansson said in his 2010 ETL talk, “are your friends.” In an overwhelmingly competitive landscape, boundaries bring us face to face with a hard truth: Sometimes, you just can’t outdo your competition. But you can think differently than your rivals and, ultimately, succeed by recognizing and operating within your own zone of expertise.

Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos once said: “One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.” Teams and organizations that leverage their own operational limits to think more creatively about how they do business often reap the rewards of differentiation. This sort of creative exercise doesn’t just prompt us to think about how to do things faster, cheaper or better ‐ it makes us question our assumptions and sometimes reinvent ourselves entirely.

Hansson — creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web-development framework and founder of the collaboration program Basecamp (formerly 37signals) — talks us through just how this looks in practice:

Perhaps the most important part of developing constructive constraints in business is to first think about our own work ethic. Why do we make the choices we do? Are our own actions aptly guided by a simple set of rules? What personal limits to place on ourselves? Hemant Shah, CEO of Risk Management Solutions, underscores the seriousness of recognizing this as a means to then realizing when we should seek help from others.

Rules and limitations can seem like irritating constraints on what we can and cannot do. But think for a moment just how powerful they could be if harnessed in the right way: a simple set of guiding covenants that empower us to make informed choices, ask for help when necessary, and ultimately allow us to save our time and energy for the more important matters in our lives.