Why is focus on your customers so important?

An essential ingredient to success of digital business transformation is focus. It must be recognized, when you are obsessed with your customer, that you can’t do everything. If you think you can, disaster is looming around the corner. You can do a few things very well. Strategy is about deciding which ones should be done. Focus is doing them. Focus is not about swinging at every pitch. Focus is about swinging at the ones that are most likely to get you on base or to advance another player so they can score.

Wanting to accomplish everything you think needs to be fixed isn’t useful. Strategy is about tradeoffs. What will make a difference in the next 6 months to your customers? If you could only focus on 3 things, what would they be? 3 may be too many still but it is better than 5 or 10 or 20 or 100.

Everything can’t be done. A few critical things can be done. What are they right now?

A culture of meetings can suck the life out of focus. People need to be given permission to say no to meetings that are of marginal value to their real focus areas.

Not making a decision about priorities is the enemy of focus. When meetings do occur, one outcome should always be about how important, relative to other priorities, this initiative is. Forcing a delay of something else to do the new thing should be question that is always asked. If you live in a world of focus, the question should be, of the 3 things I am focused on right now, which of them should I stop doing so I can take this on? People should be given permission and encouraged to ask. Management should be clear in requiring it be done.

What if you had an accountability culture that said that your year end evaluation would be determined by one result that would be worth 80 percent of your evaluation? What would that one thing be? What if that allowed you to veto other things without formally changing your evaluation criteria to take the new thing on?

It’s not a big surprise that big league baseball players can hit a pitch far better than the rest of us. Research on the game’s best hitters has shown that they have excellent hand-eye coordination and can respond quickly to visual cues. Indeed, one of the keys to a superior ball player’s performance is excellent vision and focus that allow him to see a baseball perfectly as it travels at high velocity toward home plate. Baseball players who have achieved greatness at the plate have done so by persistently keeping their eyes on the goal at hand: connecting with the ball. Entrepreneurs must likewise keep their eyes and focus on their companies. They achieve greatness by avoiding any situations that might distract them. As such, they must constantly and tightly fix their vision on the most important components of the enterprise. via The Big League Secret To Business: Focus, Focus, Focus.

Great article! I need to remember it is not how many swings I take but how many times I keep my eye on connecting with the ball!

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