current events | CorporateIntel

There’s a theme running through our workplace this year. It’s as simple as it is profound. It’s not revolutionary; it’s more of a reminder.

It’s all about focus.

Focus matters. Focus works. Focus wins.

The “what” and “how” of focus are somewhat obvious. We need to set clear priorities, narrow our agenda to initiatives that significantly elevate performance, add resources to projects that will have an impact, and let go of distractions that dilute our effectiveness.

The “why” of focus might be less obvious. We focus out of necessity. To the extent we choose to believe this is not a necessity, we either overwhelm ourselves in the endless regression of task lists or we embark on so many things with so little precision that we risk accomplishing little at all.

Focus requires us to make critical choices, to sort our many priorities into real priorities. When we ask why we are forcing ourselves to focus, the answer becomes clear. It’s the best chance we have of testing a bold thesis against a data-driven outcome. When we have evidence something works, we can double down on it. When the data shows otherwise, we can comfortably move on and reallocate always-limited resources.

When talking to musicians, you often hear there is as much importance in the notes that aren’t played as those that are. A composition is a series of choices. It even encompasses a structured use of rests. Poetry and rhetorical speech are similar. There are words left in and words extracted in the creative process to keep the emphasis on the words that remain.

Work is similar. We have endless choices for tasks, but time is forever in short supply. Not focusing is the same as not applying discipline to our business plans. It’s somewhat ironic that working oneself to exhaustion can be a reflection of lazy planning. Pick the wrong projects, pick too many of them, put in endless hours, and you might come up with nothing.

That’s another reason why we focus — to have confidence that the hours we invest are in fact invested for a prescribed return and not squandered on trivial contributions.

When we fail to focus, we nibble around the edges.

When we focus, we apply editorial selection to our competitive obsession.

I recently corresponded with a colleague on how easy it is to get lost in the day-to-day. Yes, a text will pop up every few minutes, email is without end, the phone will ring with the latest crisis when we least want to be interrupted. If we start the year with focus and then look back on the year with an evaluation of that focus, it becomes clear if those interruptions derailed us from critical focus. We have to anticipate interruptions — they are unavoidable — but if we did the hard work of applying focus upfront and then did the even harder work of staying focused on those priorities, the interruptions are unlikely to derail us.

I say it all the time: Do less, do it better.

How sure am I? Very, very sure. Each year I compel a process of goal-setting with our teams where we actively debate what things matter more than others. Throughout the year, we periodically stack rank these priorities as technology quickly evolves and business pressures change. Leaders in the company have the freedom to motivate their teams as they will, but once we have agreed on areas of focus, it is expected that those tasks will be accomplished with as much detail as necessary to equal or exceed the expected results.

At the end of the year, we look back on what got done and the impact it had. Of course, priorities shift in real-time due to current events and market forces, but I have never ended a year with a totally derailed team and no significant impact on our success.

It is true we can’t do everything and no one should believe we can. We do get a lot done. We improve processes. We align data with suppositions. We help each other get better at our jobs. We mandate exceeding the expectations of our customers.

A lot of people talk about focus. A lot fewer make it religion. If you look at the prized cohort of companies moving ahead of the competition, you are likely to see the embrace of focus.

Bring focus to bear and the year ahead will be clearer, brighter, more satisfying, and more rewarding. The alternative is often burnout and unmeasurable results. Think about next year’s review cycle and make the right commitments now. It’s not too late to get going on a breakthrough, just focus on that breakthrough and don’t let it get away from you for anything less.

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Photo: Pexels

This month our nation celebrated its 242nd birthday. As I was sitting in the stands at Dodger Stadium on July 4 watching a spectacular and patriotic fireworks display (following a wonderful midseason win) something quite obvious but strange occurred to me:

I have been alive for over 20% of our nation’s history.

That may not seem curious to you, but it does to me. No one in Russia, China, or most of western Europe can say that.

It is only because we are such a young nation that our lives constitute such a significant portion of our nation’s entire state of being.

I have been trying to put that in context. I am over a half-century in age, and the nation is less than five half centuries in age. For sake of context, I have tried to segment those de facto quintiles into what I have experienced as current events (the most recent 20%) and what I must study as history.

Latest 20%: Age of economic triumph, the information age, and age of civil rights.

Prior 20%: Age of two world wars, one Great Depression, and vast immigration.

Middle 20%: Age of Civil War and Reconstruction.

Second 20%: Age of Manifest Destiny & Industrial Revolution.

Initial 20%: Age of our Founding Fathers, American Revolution, and the visionary foundation of secular democratic governance.

It doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time for all that to have happened when you think about it. I guess that’s because it really isn’t. What’s 242 years? These days, it’s about three full lifetimes. If you time them correctly, you could talk to someone who talked to someone who knew someone who experienced Independence Day as current events.

That’s just wild. Mind-boggling! And look how far we’ve come!

Or have we?

Well, we have sent humans to the moon and probes to Jupiter and Pluto. We have air conditioning, spiffy kitchen appliances, and running water in our homes (when we don’t run out). We have lots and lots of TV channels. We have supercharged computers in our pockets we call mobile phones. We have this Internet thing that has eliminated almost all barriers to information access and makes globalization a reality.

Yet we still fight a lot, among ourselves and with faraway strangers. It seems that in every one of those quintiles we fought a lot. Maybe fighting is a constant in almost every nation’s evolution. History would seem to reinforce that recurrence.

We haven’t had all that many U.S. presidents. Our current office holder is only number 45. Many recaps of U.S. presidents show that many of the individuals who held the office weren’t very good at it in hindsight. Luckily, there are a few most of us agree regardless of political affiliation will always be American heroes. There’s Lincoln. There’s Washington. I think it might start to get controversial after that.

I wonder if the top people in charge of running our nation day-to-day in all its complexity—whether elected officials or policy makers or military leaders or business executives or educators—are in awe of their 20% stage time. I doubt it. The truly influential people I know and the many I study from afar seem to like their gigs a lot, but in my observation very few of them seem in awe.

I also wonder how many of the leaders guiding our 20% are good listeners. Do they hear the studied voices among us? Do they listen for the quieter voices who choose not to enter the knock-down, drag-out drama of overpowering influences and powerful, conflicted mandates? Do they immerse themselves in understanding the previous 80% of our time as a nation where we might have emerged a winner but didn’t necessarily embrace a sense of humility and real justice in establishing a fair set of rules? Do they strive for a true sense of vision or just winning for bragging rights and lovely take-home prizes?

I also find myself thinking about things I have lived through largely from inception, particularly the rapid compounding of computer technology. I imagine this is how people felt who went from horses and buggies to the Model T, having seen automobiles take over roads that were created for drawn carriages. I can’t remember a time before air travel, but my dad can. When I think about his lifespan, the numerator and denominator tell me he has lived through almost a third of the nation’s history. He may achieve a beguiling 40%!

I thought life was breathtakingly scientific when I sat in front of a black-and-white CRT eating Space Food Sticks while NASA astronauts blasted into orbit. Now I write about that as nostalgia while pretty much every public document in human history is available to me by typing on this keyboard into a conceptual framework of storage we simply refer to as the cloud.

Why take pause on the magnitude of a quintile? I guess for one reason because I am naturally sentimental about milestones. All forks in the road of consequence inspire my introspection, giving me excuse if not reason to try to put into perspective the meaning of our timeline.

Yet more than that, I am particularly absorbed in trying to make sense of the coming quintile, which by all stretches of the imagination I will not see resolved. I suppose if lucky I may live to see our nation on its 275th birthday, but there is not chance I will see our Tricentennial.

Am I worried what we might become collectively between now and then? If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know the depth of my concern. I guess that will give me much to write about as we walk forward together through future milestone celebrations. Between now and then, I can only hope that the nation’s leadership does embrace the gravitas of our current context.

America is an idea more than anything. Promising ideas need to be nurtured, not battered.

Speaking of milestones, this happens to be my 200th blog post since I launched CorporateIntel in 2011. Along the way I have met hundreds of interesting new people both virtually and in person. Writing is a solitary endeavor until you push the Publish button on your text editor. This magnificent innovation has opened my life to so many minds I would never otherwise have encountered. When we share ideas and swap stories, technology goes into the background and our human thoughts take precedence over the engineering that facilitates our interactions. As long as human interaction and exchange overrides the technical wonder of its creation, you can count on me for another 200.

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Photo: Pexels