The Flip-side of Focus

I’m going to talk about focus.

Here’s a typical concluding paragraph from a business article or interview about improvement in any area of performance:

“It takes commitment from the top. Every member of the top team, from the CEO downwards, needs to be a champion and role model of [fill in the gap – customer service, efficiency, health and safety, etc.]. It needs to be recognised as a top priority, measured, monitored and rewarded. Every organisation/individual that has taken this approach has improved its [customer service, efficiency, health and safety, etc.] performance by a factor of …”

You can read and hear similar advice and claims from gurus and advisors of personal development, public policy, sports and fitness, hobbies, interests and a host of other areas where people seek performance improvement. In a nutshell, if you focus on something, you get better at it.

This is a fine approach with great merits, but brings up in my mind an awkward compromising question: “What about everything else; everything you’re not focusing on?” Is there a risk that by focusing so much attention on X, then Y will get worse, or at least not improve as much as it would if it got more attention?

One UK insurance company I know spent one year putting customer service above absolutely everything else, and grew that year to market leadership. But it saw its profits turn negative and created chaotic complexity as every front line person did what was necessary to delight every individual customer. The following year saw a focus on process simplification; the next, a heavy focus on waste reduction. Each year saw improvement in that year’s particular area of focus, but standstill or decline elsewhere. After three years, the company was several places down in the market league table, and was subsequently acquired by the new market leader.

Ben Franklin established a set of thirteen personal virtues in his 20s, which he famously, and successfully, practised for the rest of his life. He would focus on one at a time, making each habitual before moving onto the next. The first and foremost of these virtues was, of all things, temperance. The reason he chose such an uninspiring virtue to lead all the others was that he needed to practise temperance in order to have the presence of mind to put the right effort into his twelve other important virtues.

The lesson from all this? Of course we need to focus our attentions. Of course we need to choose where we improve or excel: we can only do one thing at a time and we can’t be all things to all men. But we need to have the thoughtfulness and wherewithal to take things in the round, think through where we choose to focus, and we need to pay attention to the full consequences. This includes an acknowledgement that we are likely to go backwards in areas where we aren’t paying attention.

With this in mind it’s unlikely that one area of focus for performance improvement will capture everything we need. There are good precedents for multiple areas of focus. Franklin had thirteen in a carefully selected order; Jesus had a Golden Rule of two parts, the Lord’s Prayer, and a gospel full of other rules and stories; everyone I speak to from Tesco gives a different combination of reasons for its success.

People from management science backgrounds might call this approach a balanced scorecard. Life-hackers might call this priority management. To me it’s just about looking past the claims and clichés, and paying proper attention to the complete picture.


Copyright Latitude 2009. All rights reserved.

Latitude Partners Ltd
19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN
www.latitude.co.uk

Types of Blindness

There are various degrees and kinds of blindness, widow. There is the connubial blindness, ma'am, which perhaps you may have observed in the course of your own experience, and which is a kind of wilful and self-bandaging blindness. There is the blindness of party, ma'am, and public men, which is the blindness of a mad bull in the midst of a regiment of soldiers clothed in red. There is the blind confidence of youth, which is the blindness of young kittens, whose eyes have not yet opened on the world; and there is that physical blindness, ma'am, of which I am, contrairy to my own desire, a most illustrious example.

Stagg, the blind man in Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens


I’ve no doubt you’ve followed the recent bickering among the political classes about the NHS in the UK, and the proud blindness being used by all parties in their selective and romantic championing of that institution’s cause. I’ve got no idea whether this kind of deliberate or programmed blindness works in power politics; but in the areas I do know: in science, in sport, and in the subject of this blog, business and enterprise, it is a road to ruin. I’ll look at Stagg’s three types of blindness.

Let’s start with Stagg’s first example, the connubial blindness that men and women have about their lovers. People making business cases have often already fallen in love with their ideas or products. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a passion that fires the imagination for options and possibilities. The flip side is that, too often, these same people exhibit this connubial blindness, and they want to see the best of every side of the situation. They make over-optimistic assumptions, under-estimate threats and assume the market will love the idea as much as they do. Too often the consequences are the same that Dickens’ Nancy suffered at the hands of her beloved, murdering Bill Sykes.

A second kind of blindness, the blindness of party, comes when people start to believe the rhetoric espoused by their colleagues, like dyed-in-the-wool Tories, or socialists, or Republicans, or whatever. They are selective in their choice of facts, of sources of information, and of assumed consequences. People can be tribal, and there can be comfort in shared views, but this tribalism only increases the likelihood that those same people won’t challenge their own received wisdom, and will ignore some real opportunities and threats that don’t fit their group paradigm. A political example of this is communism; a business example is any bank you want to choose.

Stagg’s third example, the blind confidence of youth, is horribly apparent in new businesses and in businesses that have confused their own ability with a bull market. There’s nothing wrong with this confidence if it’s supported by some resilience in a company’s management and business model; if it can cope with a downside scenario. But this resilience is all too often absent. I’ve rarely seen such an over-confident company hit its too-lofty targets, and I’ve seen many felled by the first major blow or downturn that comes its way. Example: choose any one of 99% of companies from any boom – dotcoms in the early 2000s, property investors from financial bubble, or almost every social networking business from the last four years.

The lesson in all this? We all need to open our eyes and prop them open: to where we might not want to see something bad about our service; to where we’re not challenging the party line; or where one bad month or lost customer would sink us. Better to see the truth than suffer Nancy’s fate.

Copyright Latitude 2009. All rights reserved.

Latitude Partners Ltd
19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN
www.latitude.co.uk

The Sign of a Good Answer

In stage 16 of the 2006 Tour de France, the favourite, Floyd Landis fell badly off the pace in the last 8 minutes and crawled to the finish with his chances in tatters. The next day, stage 17, he produced the most inspiring comeback many cycling fans have seen. He attacked early, broke away from the favourites and alone sustained a pace to which the peloton, with all its wind-saving advantages, couldn’t respond. He made up enough time to eventually be crowned Tour champion.

Explanations came flooding in for this stirring physical achievement. To many fans it was a story of the triumph of human spirit and athletic supremacy. But the accepted explanation in knowledgeable circles was that Landis, by being out by himself, could to keep his body temperature under control, giving him a major physiological advantage. You see, it was an incredibly hot July day, and the riders in the peloton were suffering from sky high temperatures; meanwhile Landis spent the day pouring cold water over his head, supplied by the team car.

Seems reasonable?

A few days after Landis’ victory, his urine sample, taken after stage 17 tested positive for a banned performance-enhancing substance - synthetic testosterone.

OK, which explanation for the inspirational performance do you believe now?

You see, as we all know, it’s very easy to come up with a reason or theory for any phenomenon: why our competitor is doing twice as well as we are; why we’re not as profitable as we once were; why we’re struggling to get a foothold with a customer group; why growth has fallen off, or whatever is puzzling us.

When you review businesses and markets, as you unearth the facts and analyse the data, you come across a whole raft of potential explanations and solutions for the business’s condition and theories on what it should do next. The first set you come across is usually complex, nuanced and subtle, often received wisdom from proclaimed experts, and very tempting to believe. But if you have the gumption to ignore these temptations; if you carry on researching, challenging and turning over stones, I guarantee that you will eventually come up with a better answer that’s as plain as the nose on your face.

Scientists have a principle called Occam’s Razor, the common understanding of which is as follows, “Of several acceptable explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest is preferable, provided that it takes all circumstances into account.”

At my company, we describe it differently. We just carry on investigating, testing and searching for explanations until we uncover the one that fits our golden rule: when looked at in retrospect, it must be absolutely obvious.

Copyright Latitude 2009. All rights reserved.

Latitude Partners Ltd
19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN
www.latitude.co.uk

Straightforward and Spartan: What Big Businesses Can Learn from their Smaller Brethren

King Leonidas: [turns back shouting] Spartans! What is your profession?
Spartans: HA-OOH! HA-OOH! HA-OOH!
King Leonidas: [turning to Daxos] You see, old friend? I brought more soldiers than you did.

There is an unchallenged and lazy myth that small companies generate more wealth in the economy every year than large ones. They don’t, though the real facts are much more interesting. Research shows that three per cent of all firms account for almost all private sector employment and revenue growth; and these “high impact” firms are proportionately evenly spread across all company sizes. But here’s the killer fact: 98.3% of firms in this wealth-creating sector have 20 employees or fewer, because there are simply many more smaller firms in the world.

But how can it be that smaller firms make up so much of this GDP engine, and generate just much wealth as blue chips, who have established brands, sophisticated systems, massive buying power and the pick of the brightest talent? I’ve been fortunate to observe companies from across the size spectrum, and even more fortunate to work with some that were once in the small camp and are now large. Here are four distinctions that I see in the successful smaller ones.

First is brutality. My smaller clients have a mindset in which they will habitually challenge their propositions and expect to need to reinvent their services, even in the many instances where they are the dominant player in their particular niche. They are justifiably proud of their products, but they appreciate that today’s iPod is tomorrow’s Walkman. Cannibalisation is a fact of life, and better that they do it to themselves than their competitor does it for them.

Second is straightforwardness. Here’s an example. A client I started working with eight years ago was shortly to become one of the 3 percent club of high impact firms; it quickly became the global market leader in its niche. Then, I could ask a question to one of the Directors and they would just answer it, warts-and-all, no justifications, no qualifications. Now it has joined the 97 percent of slow-growers. I re-engaged with the firm again recently. Now, the most common first response to my questions is: “can you tell me what you will do with that information?” the second most common is: “can you tell me why you need to know that?” Following this pointless dance, we get to the same questions I was going to ask anyway, only we have time now for 25% fewer of them. And the answers are now gilded with such self-justification that finding the problems necessary to improve my client’s condition takes on a whole new level of complexity.

Third is decisiveness. My smaller clients engage only my company for advice and act on about 50% of it. They are far less exhaustive in their analysis before decisions, being happy to act on 80% confidence. In contrast, larger companies often use multiple advisers and internal teams in an often futile search for perfection, and act on 10% or less of the advice they seek.

Fourth is parsimony. If you’re used to corporate life, a smaller company’s office feels like a cell. If you’re a consultant used to the corporate jet-set, a smaller company’s fees feel like a budget airline. It’s probably not in everyone’s interest for me to highlight parsimony. But those who read these posts regularly know I'm keen on saying the truth as I see it, rather than selecting the facts that suit. Besides, Ben Franklin thought parsimony was the route to wealth, and who am I to argue with him.

So: brutality, straightforwardness, decisiveness, parsimony. Leonidas would be proud.

Copyright Latitude 2009. All rights reserved.

Latitude Partners Ltd
19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN
www.latitude.co.uk