Striving for Highest Best Use

Resources are always limited in a startup. Applying the principle of the highest best use is a way of making more optimal choices to accomplish goals.

Prioritizing and balancing all the work that needs to be done in a startup is one of the great challenges of being a startup leader. My goal is to maximize the use of each part to maximize the productivity of the whole, which requires strong management skills and clear-eyed attention to what is the most important, highest value work to accomplish. Doing this well is an art I have been musing about in various posts on this blog because it is foundational to startup success.

Work to be done always exceeds available resources for high-potential startups. A well-funded startup might feel flush; however, maximizing value creation means continually working to optimize progress achieved versus resources expended. Limited resources in a startup can take many forms.

• There is never enough time because the faster one accomplishes the next milestone, the more value creation is accelerated.
   
• Money is always precious because achieving more with less investment maximizes value creation and, hopefully, return on investment.
   
• People to tackle the next set of problems to be solved may not have precisely the right skills or experience to meet the need.  

With small teams (small is relative, but capital-efficient startups trying to maximize value creation are always “small” given what needs to be and could be done), the opportunity cost of committing resources to one task necessarily means some other work is delayed or left undone. As I reflect on how I make these decisions on a day-to-day basis, I find that we are always asking ourselves to think about the question of what to do and who should do it in terms of finding the highest best use for each resource. For example:

• Team-Level: What is our startup’s next most important thing to accomplish? Where should we focus our efforts to achieve the most progress?   Who has the essential skills and capacity to do that work? Which combination of team members can best accomplish the next goal with the right mix of complementary skills, strengths, and capacity?

• Individual-Level: Is the next task I am tackling the highest best use of the next block of my time? In other words, is this task the most important and urgent thing I can put my energy and creativity into? Am I the one with the best context and skills to do the work, or is someone else better suited or more available? And we apply this same concept to everyone on the team, sometimes making tradeoffs and compromises to get more done in parallel.

The highest best use concept is highly relevant to me personally right now as I am recovering from my neurosurgery and deciding how to deploy my gradually increasing capacity for working (a.k.a. problem-solving, the essence of my every day, which is a function of one’s frontal lobe, where my tumors used to reside). My colleagues and I are very intentionally applying the principle of highest best use as we decide how to prioritize the use of my capacity. I cannot do all we would like me to do (frustrating!), so we must make hard choices and delegate creatively. By thinking in terms of highest best use, our goal is to maximize the value I can add by choosing to have me spend my available capacity where I can uniquely contribute, or can bring extra efficiency and effectiveness to a broader group task, or reduce risk, or leverage previously nurtured relationships. Over time, my healing will progress, and my capacity will increase, so hopefully, we will have both expanded the capabilities of my team by inviting them to stretch during my recovery as well as advanced our startup on its high-potential journey.

While startups often demand that people pitch in and do whatever it takes, and sometimes, for a few minutes at least, the highest best use I can be for my team is to take out the trash or order the pizza or whatever urgently needs doing that no one else is available to do. Ideally, we would strive to play to each team member’s strengths and seek to position everyone in the work that is the best way they can contribute to the whole now. Doing that consistently creates a powerful engine of progress and value creation.