Why Focus?

January is typically that time of the year when you and your team take the time to pause to define the "strategy" for the upcoming year. What are the priorities? What should we do?

Everybody gets asked to put together a list of things he/she thinks we should work on this year. Then comes the time to put it all together during a meeting where all team members share their list and items get discussed. Questions get asked and subjects get clarified as the team evaluates the validity and importance of each idea.

The manager of the team is taking detailed notes of each action item for each of his group members. The discussion will probably lead the manager to have additional ideas. These will all end up in a long list and the team will exit the meeting with a relative sense of purpose and "strategic objectives".

Ask people around you if the concept of "focus" is an essential part of strategy, you'd get a lot of agreement. It intuitively feels right. Some would say "That's what strategy is all about". Yet, chances are you have been part of a yearly "strategic objectives" exercise where all items on the list make sense and "are important". I know I have.

Even if "Focus" is brought up during the meeting, it's going to be hard to respond to "I think it's very important we do all this!". The more you can get done, the better. "Why should we limit ourselves?". It's a good point!

So why focus? Does it actually matter? Why not do everything that seems important?

Why Focus?

I can see 6 reasons why it actually makes sense to focus: Pareto, Conflicting dynamics, Limited resources, Multitasking Paralysis, "They might", and "The good stuff is hard to get".

1. Pareto

The widely-known Pareto principle says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the efforts. This empirical "law" is illustrated in a lot of fun ways: "80% of the traffic happens on 20% of the roads", "80% of whatever you deliver in a week gets done in 1 day",...

So, no matter how important each item on the "strategic objectives" list is, 80% of the effects are going to be generated by just 20% of the initiatives. It's a law of nature.

If you like the subject, I highly recommend the excellent book "80/20 sales and marketing" by Perry Marshall.

2. Conflicting Dynamics

In their 1999 HBR article "Unbundling the corporation", John Hagel III and Marc Singer explain that "When you look beneath the surface of most companies, you find three kinds of businesses —a customer relationship business, a product innovation business, and an infrastructure business. Although organizationally intertwined, these businesses are actually very different. They each play a unique role; they each employ different types of people; and they each have different economic, competitive, and even cultural imperatives."

What you'll see is that items on the "strategic list" will come from one of those three dynamics and an important point the article is making is that each "business" has conflicting interests and thus priorities. Hence, chances are that your "strategic objectives" are conflicting.

Think about that for a moment. Whatever you do to reach one objective is getting you further away from another. This is why, beyond focus, coherent goals and actions are so important. This concept should help identify at what level your focus is sufficient.

3. Limited Resources

All companies have finite resources (people, time, money, infrastructure,...). No matter how you put it, you can't do it all. Moreover, the more things you're trying to get done, the more you spread your resources thin. You can't show up to important battles with a toothpick. In any case, with fewer resources than if you had limited the number of fights to fight and focused.

4. Multitasking Paralysis

The human mind also has its limits. Some researchers suggest that multitasking can actually reduce productivity by as much as 40%.

5. They might

What happens if you don't focus and the competition does? Remember the battle you went to with a toothpick? Well, they show up with AK-47s. Not good.

6. The good stuff is hard to get

Some of the things a company does will lead to the building/obtention of competitive advantages. These things are, by definition, important and hard to get. Competitors will try to get them before you do and getting them will require a significant allocation of resources. In other words, it will require focus.

In his book "Good strategy/bad strategy", Richard Rumelt talks about situations with a "threshold effect". In his words: "A "threshold effect" exists when there is a critical level of effort necessary to affect a system. Levels of effort below this level have little to no payoff.".

All in all

The next questions beyond this one are: "how to focus", and "on what?". The "on what" question is certainly the trickiest one.

I think Richard Rumelt brings a key element to the "how" question in his book "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy" where he says: "Strategy is visible as coordinated action imposed on a system. [...] It is an exercise in centralized power, used to overcome the natural workings of a system.".

I hope this explanation makes as much sense to you as it does to me, and hopefully, it can be helpful to some. In any case, I'd love to hear your feedback, suggestions, doubts, own reflections, and thoughts.