What are you focused on?

How effectively are you moving forward?

 Developing the FOCUS for your organization and then achieving that focus in all your people and processes is never easy but almost always essential for success. Often this work is ignored or the need rationalized away. When done, it involves understanding your relative strengths and weaknesses, developing the needed strengths and then matching these with actions that help you pursue the best opportunities and protect yourself from likely threats.  Organizations waste huge amounts of time and money when they don't have all their key people on board with where they are heading and why.  Consider that any time you put together a group of people, if you do not have clarity on where you are heading, what success looks like and on strategies for getting there, a significant percentage of EACH person's time is spent working at cross-purposes to the others. In many organizations, this can vary from 10 or 20% to 50 or 60% wasting not just thousands but often millions of dollars. On the other hand, this may be close to parity as  a recent Harvard Business Review article  summarized a study showing that nearly 80% of organizations that have what they call a strategic plan have on the following conditions:

• Wrong strategy, Good execution
• Right Strategy, Poor execution
• Wrong strategy, poor execution.
  ...And many of the rest have no real strategy in place at all.

If you see poor execution in your organization, take a look at the WHO and HOW sections to address that. If it's wrong or non-existent strategy, then it's the WHAT you need that you have to deal with.

Why Focus on the What?

• To develop the "intelligence" so you can focus on the most reward, most worthwhile goals and activities.
• Get people on the same page increasing productivity.
• To get better response to change and get a greater ability to take advantage and prosper with change
• To Enable purposeful growth
• People become more oriented and successfully at pursuing opportunities rather than talk about them
• Accountability so people do their part and work in unison
• You are clearer on things so you continually make better decisions
• When done exceptionally well, goals are achieved, resources and investments are productively deployed but...

When done poorly, as it often is, people may even go about their day to day just fine, but when it comes to doing the things to prepare for the future, overcome existing challenges, pursue opportunities… This is always costly, but often in hidden ways.

2. Barriers and myths to effective focus and Goal Achievement

• Won't commit to time to work through process
• Time/process to create the buy-in by going step-wise through the process.
• Belief that informal understandings of values, vision, mission and goals from some "exercise" are enough.
• We have no major conflicts and are surviving so "everyone must be aligned with values, vision, goals… when they are not
• The belief that a vision and or strategy is not needed after all, things "move too fast"
• The belief that we don’t need to formalize things because some “value” is our vision, mission and strategy- usually customer service/satisfaction or technical superiority.
• The belief that we’ve been successful (relative to?) to date, why do we need this?
• The belief that we’ve made it this far without it and we don’t want to risk changing things…
• Things change to fast to worry about that...

Many organizations waste huge amounts of time and money when they don't have all their key people on board with where they are heading and why. Often it's because they have no specific goals or strategy in place.  As a result, their people often then work at cross-purposes, make more "mistakes", have lower of motivation or engagement and on and on.

So how do you get it right, the right strategy and the right execution? Making significant improvements in the growth, profitability, cost structure, competitive advantages… of an organization takes a disciplined process and time. We believe there is a common sense approach and process for achieving success which most of the time necessarily involves setting the right goals and executing the right plan to achieve those goals. While common sense is one important factor, efficiency, doing it quickly without wading through minutia is also important. This minutia is a common cause which derails these kinds of efforts The effort of developing the focus and instilling it in your people is a valuable set of activities that enables you to maximize the productivity of your people, channel your efforts far more efficiently and take advantage of the environment in which you exist rather then be subject to it. The process works efficiently to move you to effective goals and a successful implementation.