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Page 47 GO IT ALONE!
do brilliantly, and from which you produce extraordinary results. If you don’t you’ll probably create high stress levels and ultimate burnout.” But what is focus? In A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time , Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal provide an excellent three-part explanation to the most important aspects of achieving focus in business. They write: - “First, rather than merely reacting to developments as they arise, or meeting routine requirements, focused managers are goal oriented. They have clear ideas about what they are striving for.”
- “Second, focus requires that a manager is intentional, channeling all activities toward achiving the desired goal. That means taking the time to reflect regularly on your own behavior, and being willing and able to choose what you do and do not do each day. Focused behavior does not emerge by chance, nor from the moment.”
- “Third, focus requires personal discipline. That means protecting yourself against the usual noise of everyday demands—or exciting opportunities—that will inevitably tug at your attention and emotions. It also means not allowing resistance to keep you from pursuing your goal.”
Al Ries’s book Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It, specifically addresses the power that focus can bring to a company. Ries’s introduction opens with a compelling analogy:
"The sun is a powerful source of energy. Every hour the sun washes the earth with billions of kilowatts of energy. Yet, with a hat and some sunscreen you can bathe in the light of the sun for hours at a time with few ill effects.
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GO IT ALONE! Copyright 2004 by Bruce Judson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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