Master and Commander

Marketing and HR folks always illustrate their ideas using two-by-two matrices, with a quality along either edge ranging from Bad to Good, and four metaphoric quadrants. The Boston Consulting Groups started it with their Growth/Share diagram

…and things just metastasized from there.

Type any two qualities followed by the word "”matrix” into Google Images and you will invariably get something:

This week, BNET, an aggregator of trends and ideas, featured some thinking from productivity guru David Allen that I thought was interesting.

‘given the week, it’s easy to see myself as Visionary–Crazy when, of course, I want to be Master and Commander.  The excerpts are intriguing, and the ideas seem generative. What’s lacking in the summaries are the prescriptive bits that suggest how to move about the matrix or to make the most of my lot in my natural quadrant.

I went through a similar epiphany years ago with the Myers-Briggs personality test, which features four axes rather than two.  I am a clear INTJ (Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Judging), and the discussion of other personality types gave me a lot of insight into how to better communicate and work with people with different outlooks more effectively. It feels like this may have similar value for how I relate to tasks and opportunities.