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It is effectively a principle of productivity, of prioritization, and business success.

So what’s the “Precious Pearl Principle”?

In Matthew 13:45-46 of the Christian Bible, Jesus tells a parable about a “pearl of great price” for which a merchant sold all that he had.

It was a parable meant to teach “priority management” in a spiritual context. The precious pearl principle is a productivity framework based on the metaphor of the “pearl of great price”.

In modern life and business, I often find that the greatest strategic challenge faced by entrepreneurs and CEOs is priority management. Priority management, in my definition, refers to that component of planning that determines the single most important element of a complex system, or the single most important destination for the investment and allocation of resources.

Such resources include but are not limited to:

1. Your Time
2. Your Financial resources (personal or business)
3. Your Attention (business or personal)
4. Your Effort (corporate or personal strategic priorities)
5. Your Staff (Using staff for highest leverage activities)

A billion dollar cottage industry has developed around time management and planning that would probably be more effective for people if they understood that the actual issue is “decision priority management”.

Asking these 3 questions can help you become a better, more systematic, priority-focused manager:

1. What’s the most important decision you need to make today?
2. What’s the most important action you need to take today?
3. What’s the highest yield, highest leverage function you have as an entrepreneur, manager, or CEO?

It is this underlying “priority logic” that makes goal-setting so important to the success of individuals and companies. To paraphrase Dr. Eli Goldratt, goals give a business a “decision procedure”. A way to decide whether to worry less about X than about Y.

For instance, as a business growth consultant, I emphasize marketing mastery as the highest return growth lever for any businesses I work with. I find that many small businesses delegate away far too many marketing decisions and skill sets. Creating a marketing system that you can optimize with each passing day is absolutely necessary to building true asset wealth in your small business.

The most common aptitude possessed by successful entrepreneurs and CEOs is consistently knowing how to set the right priorities and make the right resource allocation decisions. This simple skill is why the CEO gets paid the big bucks while a hard-working but misguided front line worker gets to sit and gripe about how much the CEO gets paid.

If you’re a fan of the movie “The Lord of The Rings”, you can identify the movie’s parable of the “One ring” as an updating of the precious pearl parable (not surprising since author J.R.R. Tolkien was a Christian interested in ancient narratives and metaphor). In “The Lord Of The Rings”, the One Ring was the goal worth tossing everything else aside for, because it was the “one ring to rule them all”. It was the one thing that if you could get it, you could get all the other things you needed and wanted.

By itself, the “One Ring” provided a decision procedure for daily action for all parties associated with it. If you’ve never watched “The Lord Of The Rings”, here’s a short scene that really explains the idea.

This Precious Pearl (Or “One Ring”) Principle is the most important idea in business, and finds expression in:

• Goal-setting
• Market Research
• Target Marketing and Selection
• Business Planning
• Business and Sales Forecasting
• Project Management
• Budgeting
• Exit and Succession Planning
• Work-life balance
• And much, much, more

Take goal-setting for example. If you’ve struggled with a “goal-setting” resolution you made after attending a weekend business seminar, it’s because you’ve never seen the connection between “goal-setting” and this principle.

Goal-setting setting is about choosing a precious pearl in the midst of a bewildering array of current and future choices. Going through the goal-setting process gives you the “faith” to stick with the destination decision you’ve made, and allows you to avoid wasting time, effort and resources on options that do not contribute significantly toward the goal.

If you examine current trends, you’ll discover that the years to come will only provide more bewildering options, not less; more choices, not less. While “more choice” is almost always taken to be synonymous with “better” in the western world, authors like Barry Schwartz (in “The Paradox of Choice”) and Jack Trout (in “Differentiate or Die”) have identified some of the pains associated with too much choice and not enough constraint in business and personal decision-making.

Applying the Precious Pearl Principle in a strategic marketing context for example, will force you to decide on your Golden Customer (your most wanted client), and that decision will cascade positively down and throughout your marketing system. How?

You’ll find it easier to know what they want, the most important message/promise they want to hear from you, and the most important operational shape your business should take to fulfill those promises.

Do you see how answering one question can help you answer one hundred (100) subsequent questions correctly? Do you see how it can help you do this faster and easier?