Maintain Your Focus
Here’s a great little bit from Manage It, by Johanna Rothman…this book is highly enlightening and it’s great to know I’m not the only person thinking some of these things.
I once worked for a company that decided aftear a several-day offsite strategy meeting that we were going to “focus on five.”
That isn’t focus.
Focus means to center all of the attention toward something. Five strategic areas are four too many.
Unfortunately, it’s all too common for companies to spread themselves too thin in order to be all things to all possible customers. If that’s the problem where you work, move to short iterations as quickly as possible so you can say to your management, “OK, we can start that next week, because we’ll be finishing this in two days.” Even better, make sure your iterations start and end in the middle of the week, such as a Wednesday. That way if your managers have “a-ha” ideas over the weekend, they’ll probably give you a couple of days to finish what you were doing.
Your team will thank you for maintaining focus.
Stay the course, folks.
If that course includes too much stuff, either strip some of the dead weight, or move on.
