Focus

One of the tricks to growth is focus.

Go back to the basics of strategy: mass the greatest resource at the point of greatest opportunity. Your job as leader is to work out, among all the opportunities and issues competing for your limited bandwidth, what are you going to pay attention to?

Paying attention to some things mean paying less attention to others. In other words you have to start saying no to stuff, just like Steve Jobs.

Jobs brought focus and intensity when he came back into Apple in 1997. Of course since he did the big prune, Apple has expanded but there’s always a link back to beautiful software. That’s been the focus.

Focus is how you deal with the problem of complexity, the stuff you’ve kept over the years that now weighs you down. Focus allows you to declutter your business and your mind so that you can pay more attention and bring greater intensity.

It’s not easy. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, tells the story of a manager who was asked by an employee to set some priorities so resources would be applied sensibly. The manager's response: "Why can't we concentrate our resources across the board?"

Getting focus means getting clear about some fundamentals:

What are the biggest opportunities you’ve got? You may select no more than 3What will you stop doing?How many hours a week will you personally put into your area of focus?

People come into our workshops, action groups and individual coaching sessions with their head full of issues, opportunities, more issues, risks, worries - the usual crowded mind of a small business owner. They leave with clarity about what is important and what they have to do from here.