|
Page 48 GO IT ALONE!
A laser is a weak source of energy. A laser takes a few watts of energy and focuses them in a coherent stream of light. But with a laser you can drill a hole in a diamond or wipe out a cancer. When you focus a company, you create the same effect. You create a powerful, laserlike ability to dominate a market. That’s what focusing is all about." It is this laserlike power that individuals can now achieve by combining extreme outsourcing with personal leverage. This may sound simple, but in practice it’s not. Although the creation of a central objective sounds easy, over time the sometimes mundane work of pushing forward may seem less engaging. It’s naturally more exciting to start thinking about new big objectives than to continue working at “singles and doubles,” the small wins and big wins that slowly but surely advance the company toward its goal. As detailed in Chapter 3, there is also an inherent, inevitably damaging tendency toward drift. Both small and large companies start out with clear objectives but frequently become distracted by new possibilities that emerge over time.
Failure Is the Inevitable Consequence of a Lack of Focus John Osher, the successful serial entrepreneur, discussed the flip side of this argument: What happens when focus is lost? In an interview in Entrepreneur magazine, Osher cites a lack of focus as one of the most common mistakes that causes start-ups to fail: “Many entrepreneurs go in too many directions at once and do not execute anything well. Rather than focusing on doing everything right to sell to their biggest markets, they divide the attention of their people and their time, trying to do too many things at [one time].”
Search the complete text of Go It Alone!
Terms of Use
GO IT ALONE! Copyright 2004 by Bruce Judson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
|
|
