Smartcuts

Smartcuts

In January 1981, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the fortieth President of the United States. He was sixty-nine years old. What the textbooks rarely mention is that he had never served in the Senate. He had never served in the House of Representatives. He had been a B-movie actor, a radio announcer, and a governor for two terms. By the conventional logic of American politics -- you do the lower rungs before you do the upper rungs -- his path to the White House made no sense. He had not paid the expected dues. He had not waited his turn. He had, in the language Shane Snow would use three decades later, skipped the ladder entirely. And he would consistently rank in historians' top-ten lists of most effective American presidents.

Snow is a journalist and co-founder of the content marketing company Contently. His 2014 book, published by HarperBusiness under the subtitle "How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success," is a piece of rigorous reporting disguised as a business self-help book. He spent years collecting data and case studies on one simple question: why do some people and organizations reach the top in a fraction of the time it takes everyone else -- and what, exactly, are they doing differently?

The answer he found is not hustle. It is not talent. It is not luck, though luck sometimes enters. The answer is a specific kind of leverage -- a way of working that systematically eliminates unnecessary effort while compounding the effort that remains. Snow calls it a smartcut. The word is not a euphemism for shortcut. A shortcut implies cutting corners, skipping necessary steps, getting away with something you should not. A smartcut is different. It is finding a path that others have not taken because they assumed it was closed. It is lateral thinking -- a term coined by psychologist Edward de Bono -- applied to your career, your project, or your organization.