Chapter 3 was all about learning to translate business problems into prescriptive questions that, in our case, must always be actionable. But what is actionable? Or even better, is everything actionable? We now turn to this question in our quest to find levers that take us closer to the prescriptive ideal.
One word of caution: to find levers, we need to know our business. This is not to say that you must have spent many years in one specific industry. That might help, as you must’ve developed strong intuitions about why things work and when they don’t. But it is also true that many times having a non-expert, even naive, view can help us think out of the box and expand our menu of options.
Going back to our decomposition, we will now move from the outer right side, where business outcomes live, to the outer left side, which contains the levers we pull (Figure 4-1). As we’ve already mentioned, this is the natural and healthy sequence to adopt: we start with the business, and then ask how we can achieve the best results by pulling the right set of levers.
Figure 4-1. Identifying the levers we want to pull
Understanding What Is Actionable
The hard truth about life and business-making is that most of our objectives can only be achieved indirectly, through actions we take. For instance, we can’t increase our sales, or productivity, or customer ...
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