I spent the past few days reading a couple of really interesting books:
Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant by Roland Lazenby
and
What these books shared in common was the theme of obsession and focus.
And, that got me to thinking about what are some of my focuses and obsessions in writing this blog and covering the things that I have been working on for the bulk of my career.
So I thought I would use this period between Christmas and New Year’s to take a moment to highlight some of the themes that I see popping up from time to time.
1. Simplification: I think that too many businesses and organizations complicate things needlessly. I think that this complication causes a lack of focus, a lack of success, and a lack of progress.
2. The need for knowledge workers to constantly grow: There used to be a clear delineation between knowledge workers and laborers, but as more and more of our jobs are considered “knowledge” based, we have to fight the challenge of allowing our knowledge work to just become a new sort of manual labor. The promise of knowledge work was the promise of doing constantly different and more challenging work, but are we really living up to that?
3. Death of paint by number jobs: Repetitive tasks and check list based operations are going away. There will still be room for a few of them, but the majority of them are going to go away and not come back.
4. Focus on your core competencies: Sometimes we try to do too much. You need to really settle in on your core competencies and do a few things very well.
5. Need for nonprofits to focus on maximizing their performance: I think that nonprofits are doing the lord’s work, but in too many of them, they get lost in the mission. The challenge for nonprofits is that they need to absolutely perform and measure their impact in meaningful ways, the same as for-profit businesses.
6. The need for everyone to be focused on expressing value over benefits: Value is where the magic is, but too many people and organizations only focus on the low value stuff, like benefits.
7. Explosive growth isn’t a miracle, it can happen with the right efforts: I’ve been in the middle of several projects and businesses that have experienced incredible growth…like 1,000% growth in sales or 300% growth in fundraising dollars. These things have one thing in common, they aren’t miracles, but the results of some good planning and great follow through.
8. Price isn’t the most important thing, if you are telling the value story: Price is usually a cop out if you haven’t done a good enough job of focusing on value.
9. Growth mindset and growth first and always: I think we can fall in love with cutting and doing things effectively or efficiently. The thing is that you can’t cut your way to growth, so you need to make sure that you are investing in things that will lead to growth. And, focus on how you can grow.
10. The power of stories: I know that stories are the most powerful things we have in business, nonprofits, and government. Too often, we don’t use them powerfully enough. Stories are vital to giving our target audience the emotional intensity needed to take action.
11. Brands are your most valuable assets: I think that brands can do much of the work for you. They can lead your marketing, sales, and business development efforts. But in too many cases, brands aren’t deployed with enough focus and enough emphasis on their unique value and story.
12. The power of the individual and the team: I want people and teams to do better work because that will give them power to create change and security.
13. Sickness of government and the supporting systems: Government and many of the systems and people around it are broken and focused on maintaining and keeping their own power…citizens be damned.
14. You need to be prepared to destroy that which made you successful: Don’t get wed to your current successes, growth and renewal are the only key factors.
15. Never take action without a plan: Too many people lead with action, action first and thinking later. But that often leads to unintended consequences. You need to have at least a little bit of a plan so that you know where you are going.
16. Community is key: As our economy and our world searches for more experiences, community is more and more important. How can we foster and grow communities?
17. Your one and only job is to build and keep profitable customers: That’s it! The only job you have is to grow customers.
18. Great companies, great businesses, great experiences mean something: Great companies bring value to their communities! Great businesses are the lifeblood of our communities! Great experiences are everything!