Portfolio - the discipline of what you leave out (Word at Work Series)

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Word at Work. I hope you're having a great day. It is particularly hot here in The UK at the moment. So Word at Work is where we take a word, we look at the definition, we explore the history, and we look at what this word means for the world of work. Today's word is portfolio.

Now, many people think it means a collection of financial investments. We imagine a trader or a financial expert looking after a portfolio of investments of money. Or actually maybe it's the creative angle and you're looking at this word from the perspective of a creative portfolio, a collection of your best work. Well, both are actually pretty good, but let's have a look at the dictionary definition. Now, the Oxford English Dictionary gives us, you know, several meanings, but they broadly come down to this.

Portfolio is considered a noun and it's a flat case, especially one used for carrying loose papers, drawings, or documents. It is a collection of work or documents assembled to demonstrate a person's skills, achievements, or experiences. It's a range or collection of investments, projects, products or other assets managed as a group. And it's also the responsibilities or department assigned to a government minister. For example, the education portfolio.

But the common thread is actually surprisingly consistent. A portfolio is something that gathers related things together for a purpose. So now let's look at the history of the word. So the word portfolio comes from the Italian porta foglio porta porta foglio. Oh, my word.

I'm so sorry if you're Italian and I have absolutely butchered that word. But it basically combines two words, porta, which is to carry, and fogglio, which is a sheet of paper or leaf. Really, it literally translates into something that carries papers. Now, the Italians inherited porta from the Latin porta, meaning to carry, to transport, or to bear something. So originally, a portfolio wasn't an abstract business concept at all.

It was probably a leather case for carrying important papers. But over time, as usual, something interesting is happening. The word essentially stopped referring to the container and started referring to what the container contained, and then it evolved again. And eventually, it came to me not just the contents, but the deliberate management of these contents. That's why today we talk about investment portfolios, product portfolios, project portfolios, creative portfolios.

The meaning shifted from a case to a collection to a carefully managed collection. But that history of the word tells us something important, that a portfolio is never just about carrying things, organizing things, and buying expensive tools. It was about deciding what was important enough to carry. So what portfolio actually means then is kind of a deliberately chosen collection of assets managed together to achieve an outcome. The important words aren't really collection or even assets, they're together and outcome because a portfolio isn't just a pile of papers, it's not just a pile of things, it isn't a list, it isn't a Kanban board, It isn't a backlog.

It isn't a to do list in a digital tool. It is a system. And that's where the word really becomes interesting. Because once you start seeing a portfolio as a system, you stop asking questions like what have we got here? And instead, maybe start asking questions like why do these things belong together?

So every organization has portfolios, not just investment portfolios. They've got product portfolios, project portfolios, technology portfolios, customer portfolios, skills portfolios, and of course supplier portfolios. The challenge then isn't creating more portfolios and more things within them. It's actually deciding what belongs together and equally importantly, what doesn't. What doesn't belong in the portfolio.

And you can usually spot that moment a portfolio stops being a portfolio and just becomes a container of a whole load of random stuff because people in work will often say, you know what, whilst we're doing that, we could also do this or let's just add this in or let's squeeze this one in or I've got this little project that I can't get funding for. So, you know, can you put that into your work? Another project, another report, another initiative, another feature. And every addition, these these little additions, they feel really small. They feel like just a little bit of a flex to what people are doing.

But together they actually change the nature of the portfolio itself because before long it's no longer curated. It's carrying every good idea anyone has ever had. And I see this in the workplace a lot, especially in certain situations in many organizations actually, where people start adding tasks, they start adding things to do to Kanban boards, to project plans, to lists. A list is kind of everything that people want to get done, but a portfolio is actually a decision. Because every addition creates cost, every removal creates focus, And that's the trade off that every portfolio manager is making, whether they realize it or not.

Because without that deliberate curation, those portfolios slowly become museums, catalogs, digital clusters of random stuff, projects nobody quite remembers starting, ideas nobody wants to delete but doesn't have somewhere else to put it, Work that nobody feels able to stop. Secret, small personal projects that the high flying executive wants to get done. And the strategy, which is what ultimately a portfolio is aligned to, well, that gives way to accumulation, to random tasks. So perhaps the better question isn't what should we add? It's perhaps if we add this, what gets removed or even better, what no longer belongs in this portfolio?

Because that's how portfolios stay connected to the strategy, to the investment, and to the outcome that they were created to achieve. And this matters enormously because modern work isn't really constrained by ideas. We have plenty of ideas, loads of them. Tons and tons of ideas. There's no shortage of ideas of things we could do in an organization, but it is constrained by attention, by time, by energy, by money, and of course by people.

And a portfolio simply, and the easiest way to say this is, these are the things that we're choosing to invest in purposefully. Everything else has to wait. And that isn't actually failure, that is curation. And that is the point of a portfolio. It's also why portfolio management sits at the heart of the idea to value system because every portfolio should have a visible thread running through it.

Investment becomes activity which creates value. If that thread disappears, it gets overwhelmed with a myriad of other things that aren't related to investment and the outcome, then the portfolio becomes almost impossible to steer. You don't know what to stop, you don't know what to accelerate, you don't know whether the investment is actually producing the outcome you hoped for. And this is why I see organizations spend thousands, literally if not millions, on reporting, on governance, on very expensive portfolio management tools, when often the real problem is actually much simpler. They've lost sight of that thread.

That connection between investment, the activity that underpins it, and the value that is generated from it. That is the guiding principle in the idea to value system, and that is what a portfolio is for. A collection of work that we are investing in for a particular outcome. And once you restore that visibility and better decisions become possible, not because the framework or the delivery methodology or anything else has changed, but because people can finally see it, then that is when portfolios really thrive. So perhaps a portfolio isn't really a collection at all.

It's actually closer, I think, to a declaration. A declaration of what deserves our attention. A declaration of what deserves our investment. A declaration of the future that we are trying to create, and that's why the quality of a portfolio has very little to do with how much it contains, but it has everything to do with what you're willing to leave out, because work isn't transformed by collecting more, by squeezing in more, by doing more. It is transformed by choosing better.

Anyway, hope that's been helpful, useful. Please do check out the website cultivatedmanagement.com because there's all sorts of articles on there around Word at Work. You'll find the public commonplace information as well as all the other courses and free gifts and books and articles. Anyway, there's lots and lots of stuff on there, and I look forward to speaking to you in the next episode. You take care of yourselves.

Bye bye.