The "Burnout" Portfolio

In this week's episode, Ricardo makes an analogy between the book "The Burnout Society" by the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han and our current work.

The book talks about how the pressure we put on ourselves to break the limits has produced a sick society.

Ricardo's analogy centers on our choice process. Companies want to do everything without investing in anything.

During their portfolio selection, the executives aim to make everything, but there are no resources. People want to do more with less until a point is reached of making the infinite out of nothing.

In the end, he addresses three topics: the importance of focus, our inability to do everything, and our choice process.

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Episode transcript

The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.

Ricardo (4s):
Hello, everyone! welcome to the 5 minutes Podcast. Today I like to talk about a book that I was reading called The Burnout Society. I published this on my social media and it was written by being shown Han a Korean philosopher. And you may ask why or why I'm talking about this because this podcast is not about books and it's not about philosophy, but eight made me remember a lot about portfolio management and prioritization. It's how we need to select things. And the success of the book is that we are becoming our worst enemies because we are putting ourselves.

Ricardo (46s):
And we, when I say it's a business people ourselves, by creating this desire of doing everything design or overcoming limits, every single minute of the life, and these are all reflects on the way we manage our organizations. Because for me, there is no distinction between living and working. And we are the ones making decisions on behalf of our organizations in many times, what do we want to do? We want to do absolutely everything. We want to do everything. We are limitless on all aspects and I'm including myself on that. And I think we need to manage three different aspects.

Ricardo (1m 28s):
Here. First is focus. We need to have a specific one is relevant for our organization. What is relevant for our company? Which Project should I really undertake? Yes. I can not have such a broad focus where everything can fit, because if everything can fit you or not prioritizing or anything, and one important topic. This second point I want to share with you is that it's impossible for us to do everything it's impossible. And for me, one of the biggest challenges in every single work I did in portfolio management was not select what we should do, but not select what we do not want to do it.

Ricardo (2m 15s):
The problem is with the no. And the problem is to leave things outside. 'cause when you decide not doing that project for your company, I am a hundred percent sure that someone in your company would say, Oh, but a competitor, or maybe doing that, or the technology's moving on that direction. So what happened is that we try to grab everything and we have limited. And this is why I know that this is supposed to be in English, but in Portuguese, the translation of this book is called <inaudible>. It means, you know, that as a tired Society. And this is very, very important because we don't have focus.

Ricardo (2m 58s):
For example, when I see companies doing a portfolio management approach at the end of the year or twice a year, but to prepare their budgets and they come up with a thousand projects, how a nurse, even if you have all the resources, it just, you need to prioritize something. And one of the ways of doing that, it is to use a clear criteria in the green, on the criteria before you apply on the projects and you can do a cost benefit as I showed it to you during my what matters episode stock and about personal planning. But you can do far more complex things and far more robust. You can use a multiple set of criteria and you can use quite a nice math to have a more clarity on your decision-making, for example, using AHP.

Ricardo (3m 47s):
But you need to do that. It's so important because otherwise you will try and you will say, okay, now I am working 10 hours, then 12 and 14, for example, this is the reason why I'm doing that because now it's past midnight here and I'm still working. And I started my day. Something like 7:00 AM. So it's just impossible. It's unfeasible for people because we try to do everything. We need to understand what is important they are. And I'm talking this to myself, into each of you listening to me because you are the leaders, you are the ones driving the decisions in your organizations, and we need to understand what should we focus on?

Ricardo (4m 28s):
We spend our energy to avoid spending our energy in a billion different things and getting just nowhere. So think about that. I hope you have a lovely, we can see you next week with another 5 minutes Podcast.

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