What If You Focus On The Wrong Thing?

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all …” ~W. Edwards Deming

“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth.   Not going all the way, and not starting.”   ~Siddhartha Gautama

Nothing makes me happier than to get insight and comments on the various musings from this blog.  When I talked last week about the process of aligning your business, I had mentioned on Facebook that a focused business is a profitable business.  I will acknowledge that the comment was oversimplified and full of holes. My good, longtime friend Patrick called me on it by saying: “Unless you are focused on the wrong things.”

What if you did focus on the wrong things?  Have you ever worried about that?

Let me ask you another questions, are you focused on anything right now? For business owners at many different levels, having any focus is a challenge.

Being that I work with current business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs, I get a lot of questions from the aspiring entrepreneurs about their concerns with taking their first entrepreneurial step.  They are so fearful of being wrong that they are paralyzed to take action.  So often they don’t.

On the flip side I work with business owners who have been in business for years who suffer from a lack of a specific focus on what makes them great.  A common scenario is a business owner who has been struggling to grow and continues to add new product lines and services to their current offerings with the hopes that more products to sell equals more revenue to generate.  The reality is that it may generate more revenue but it doesn’t generate more profit.

More revenue equals more responsibility and when you add more responsibility and you don’t increase your reward, you are now in a worse spot than you were before.

This brings me back to focus.  It’s easier than ever to do business and compete.  We get bombarded with media and information and also with the ability to connect with people.  Because of this, we are bombarded with opportunity.  This is a good thing but it can also cause us to lose focus on what are best options are as everything tends to look good.

Seth Godin talks about shipping in his book Linchpin.  Shipping is about getting things done.  Not just any things.  Things that matter.  Our Alignment Blueprint tool is about things identifying those things that matter and then going after it with laser focus.  I know that you have many roads that you can travel.  There are truly only a handful that really matter to you and that’s what you want to try and identify.

Back to Patrick’s comment about focusing on the wrong things. He is absolutely right that you can focus on the wrong things but I will tell you what I tell my clients.  You won’t know if your focus is right if you don’t put a full effort into making it work and measuring progress along the way.  Measuring progress is the key, you have to keep your eye on progress to ensure that it’s the right progress.  If it’s not, then it’s time to course correct.  If you focus on too many things at one time, it becomes difficult to know what’s working and what isn’t.

The American auto industry realized this way too late.    By the time the realized they lacked focus, many of the American auto companies were begging the government for money and killing their brand.

Another area where lack of focus is common is in marketing.  So many business owners try everything they possibly can to market their product/service.  Meanwhile they don’t measure the results and they never key on what really works and doesn’t work.  In the end, marketing becomes this elusive dream that is more frustration than getting your powerful word out to the masses.

Our society will be more productive when we learn to identify and focus on what the best channels are for us to create value.  There is more than one path to do this so you need to pick one and don’t take too long to do it.   When we worry too much about focusing on the right things, we end up not doing anything.

When we do nothing, we stay in jobs we hate and live lives that don’t inspire is.  But hey, at least you played it safe.

Are you focused on the wrong things? That question doesn’t matter near as much as “Are you focused at all?” and “Are you inspired by your focus?”.  The only way you will know what’s right is to take a path and start moving and check in on the results along the way.  See you on the other side.

PS…. Patrick, Peter Drucker is the father of management, not Deming.  🙂