STEP 8 Have each department set their Rocks as a team. Just as the leadership team sets their Rocks, each department team follows the exact same process to set theirs as well. In the end, each employee will have his or her own Rocks for the quarter.

The process works like this: Your team meets for a full day every 90 days. You review your vision, and then determine what the Rocks are for the organization for the next 90-day period to keep you on track for your vision.

When you have successfully created a 90-Day World by setting and completing Rocks every 90 days, you will become more focused, get more accomplished, and have a higher level of accountability.

You will establish the three to seven most important priorities for the company, the ones that must be done in the next 90 days. Those priorities are called Rocks.

With that, a wall goes up, and no one is allowed to throw anything else over it, whether it’s a genius-level new idea or a hand grenade. Once the priorities are set for this quarter, no new priorities can be added! If someone does try to throw something else over, you get to throw it back because you all agreed on the current Rocks as being the most important priorities for this quarter. New ideas and thoughts that arise during the quarter should be put on the V/TO Issues List for next quarter.

Assign who owns each Rock. This is vital for clear accountability. Each of the three to seven company Rocks must be owned by one and only one person on the leadership team. When more than one person is accountable for a Rock, no one is accountable. The owner is the person who drives the Rock to completion during the quarter by putting together a timeline, calling meetings, and pushing people. At the end of the quarter, the owner is the one that everyone looks at to assure the Rock was completed.

That’s why you create a 90-Day World. Rather than be overwhelmed by the monumental task of accomplishing your vision, this allows you to break it down into bite-size chunks called Rocks

Business strategist Dr. Stephen Covey used rocks, pebbles, and a bucket to teach time management. In the activity, he filled the bucket with the small pebbles and then added the medium and large rocks. However, with the small pebbles taking up the bottom half of the bucket, the medium and large rocks couldn’t all fit. He emptied the bucket and started over, this time putting in the medium and large rocks first, and pouring the pebbles into the gaps around the larger rocks. By “putting first things first,” like magic, everything else fits in the same space. Putting the pebbles in first is majoring in minor things.

Let's drop rocks on them!

When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, 'My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,' even if what you see can scare the hell out of you.

A window of opportunity for me usually involves a rock.

And how will I accomplish this? First I will set goals for the day, the week, the month, the year, and my life. Just as the rain must fall before the wheat will crack its shell and sprout, so must I have objectives before my life will crystallize. In setting my goals I will consider my best performance of the past and multiply it a hundredfold. This will be the standard by which I will live in the future. Never will I be of concern that my goals are too high for is it not better to aim my spear at the moon and strike only an eagle than to aim my spear at the eagle and strike only a rock? Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold.

Goal setting is the secret to a compelling future.

You’ve heard of “Rocks for Jocks,” the gimme course that departments of geology often offer? The physics department offering was called—among the faculty, anyway, “Quarks for Dorks.” Lucky me, I got to teach it.