In yesterday’s post I introduced the concept of the Parthenon Principle, made famous by success expert Brian Tracy.
Let’s take a look at how you can strengthen individual components of your overall efforts to create positive changes in your outcomes. You’ll focus on the essence of the Parthenon Principle:
- Define the support “pillars” for your system, skill, task, or project
- Make incremental changes in each of these pillars
- See large improvements in your outcome, which is now supported by stronger pillars
Growing Your Business
Not Using the Parthenon Principle:
- Redesign your core product from top to bottom
- Design and engineering teams work for one or two years on new version
- Release the new version of the product
- Marketing team creates new, large-scale campaign/li>
Outcome:
Internal: Disruption to workflow. Challenging to coordinate efforts across teams.
Marketplace: Unknown. You won’t know if the market accepts the new version of your product until it’s too late.
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With the Parthenon Principle:
- Make incremental changes to your core product
- Design and engineering teams fulfill small improvements on a regular basis
- New versions of the product brought to market often
- Marketing team regularly communicates improvements to customers
Outcome:
Internal: Entire organization working together with each team making small, easy changes in their workflow.
Marketplace: Improved sales as customers get what they want quickly and on a regular basis.
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Improving Your Golf Game
Not Using the Parthenon Principle:
- At the driving range, always get out your driver.
- Improve your distance off the tee.
- Work on power to get closer to the green.
Outcome:
You drive better and feel good about that. But, your scores don’t improve. Your short game is still sloppy and you’re still 3-putting.
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With the Parthenon Principle:
- You split your bucket of balls up equally among driving, short game, and chipping
- You put in time on putting and reading greens
- You work not only on distance/power, but also accuracy/finesse
Outcome:
Your scores improve because you’re a little better at allstages of each hole. You’re having better outcomes on each shot, not just your drives.
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Mastering Presentation Skills
Not Using the Parthenon Principle:
- Your presentation focuses on the importance of your idea
- By having an important idea, you try to show that you are important too
- You spend your presentation discussing the details of your idea
Outcome:
Your audience may or may not remember the idea. They may or may not think that the idea is relevant in their lives. They may or may not engage with you for followup.
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With the Parthenon Principle:
- Your idea is presented in a way that relates to your audience’s needs, desires, and point of view
- You have a memorable opening and closing
- You are an engaging, trustworthy presence on stage
- You have a clear call to action that makes it easy for your audience to followup with you
Outcome:
You stand a much better chance of your audience remembering your idea and wanting to interact with you so that your idea is implemented.
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Strengthening Parts Improves the Whole
The Parthenon Principle gives you an easy-to-use framework to improve your outcomes by focusing on small changes to individual facets of your work. Making small changes to multiple aspects of what you’re doing is much easier and less time-consuming than attempting (and likely failing) to make a big change to one facet of your project.
Rather than having tunnel vision, the Parthenon Principle guides you to see all the interrelated parts working together for your success. See if you can make improvements in each of these “pillars” that will support your overall effort.
I love the Parthenon Principle because it meshes seamlessly with my Ten Minute Virtuoso method. When you’re making small changes to each “pillar” of your project, these changes can often happen in short bursts of focused activity rather than taking over your entire life. I’m always looking for strategies that allow people to improve their lives by spending short amounts of time to get a lot accomplished. The Parthenon Principle is just such a strategy.
