The Six P's

My first exposure to the Six P's was when I undertook basic training in the Army. It was drilled into us that "Prior making ready and Planning Prevents Poor Performance". (Actually I have sanitised that just a bit.

Being a somewhat optimistic and clear reasoning person, I later converted the Six P's to be "Prior making ready and Planning Promotes clear Performance".

High Bandwidth

So what's the point of telling you about this?

Well, we just moved house, and with a family of 5 (all of whom who are hoarders), this was no small undertaking! I wouldn't say that it was executed with the precision of a troops manoeuvre, but without the Six P's we would have been in big trouble.

And that got me reasoning about how it relates to business...

I'm not sure how much of this was propaganda, but I remember being taught in my early company studies about the basic discrepancy in the middle of post World War Ii Japanese and Western manufacturing.

The Japanese would start by planning extensively - for up to 80% of the time available for the task - and then execute - just once - to a very high standard, if not perfectly.

On the other hand, the Western managers would authentically plan - but for much less time (say 20%) - and then execute the plan. And then adjust and re-execute to fix up all the errors.

Cirque du Soleil shows are another bright example of effectiveness of the Six P's.

A Cirque show will start with experts (performers, yield etc) and even then, still take everywhere from 2 to 4 years to prepare! The artists all feel artistic and acrobatic training at the Creation Studio where they colse to twenty trainers from colse to the world to supervise performer-training programs.

Kà, which opened at the Mgm Grand in late 2004 - an extravaganza perfect with giant puppets, archers shooting flaming arrows, and the "Wheel of Death" - cost 5 million to stage and was 4 years in the making.

O, a theatre based show performed in the water, took more than 400,000 man-hours of preproduction and yield work to prepare, not counting the time spent on the construction of the theatre (and another Us0 million).

My own experiences with performance are similar - years of scales and lessons to get my voice ready, followed by practicing each song authentically hundreds of times, before I was ready to achieve live on stage or to record.

The Six P's make it all look effortless, but only if you've done the work beforehand.

The same applies to just about any discipline you can name.

Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Bing Crosby all made singing look effortless. So did Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly when it came to dance.

How easy did Johnny Wilkinson and Andrew Mehrtens make it look to kick a rugby ball accurately? Or these players when they hit a tennis ball? Court, Navratilova, Evert, Goolagong, King and Graf.

My friend Robyn is the fastest typist I have ever seen. She was last measured at over 150 Wpm!

Whether you are an accountant who can look at the numbers and see things mere mortals cannot, or a company coach / mentor who can spot the real issue - not just the symptoms, or maybe a counsellor who knows in the moment just the right interrogate to ask, people look at you in awe and ask "How do you do that?"

How? I'd recommend it is the Six P's at work.

It is conservatively estimated that it takes 10,000 hours to come to be "expert" in something. This equates to 250 x 40 hour weeks = 5 years full-time.

Becoming an expert in your field (no matter either it is law, descriptive design, dentistry, sales, importing, speculation etc.) has come to be a prerequisite to firstly survive and then flourish.

So if it takes this long, how can we speed up the process of becoming an expert? 5 years is a long time, especially if you are in the early stages of your business.

The hidden is the Six P's - combined with doing work On the business.

Yes, I know, we've all heard it before. But do we do it?

The Six P's