Focus - the power to find your way in troubled waters

Introduction

As I begin my musings I am flying into the night high over the Canadian prairie. Have you heard the expression "a view from 30,000 feet"? Well, it refers to taking a broad view of things, as in "never mind the details just yet". That could be a fitting lead-in to a story of its own given the circumstances.

But alas, that's not where I am headed (pun intended). What I am musing about now is altogether more laser-like. Let me put you in the picture.

My wife recently gave me a set of two audio cassettes by Al Ries called quot;Focus". (Al Ries is renowned for his successful book "The 23 Immutable Laws of Marketing".

She found the tape set in a clearance bin at our local supermarket, of all places. The price was certainly right, the hype on the jacket sounded intriguing and she thought I might be interested. I was, but at first only in a general sort of way.

Since I had a lot of other stuff in my pipeline I needed to get past, Al's tapes sat on my shelf patiently awaiting my attention.

Most days I commute to work on Vancouver's un-marvelous Skytrain. I usually bring a book or listen to audiotapes. So, eventually I worked my way through the backlogged time killers and let Al up to bat. So to speak.

Authors reading their own books aren't always a great combination. But Al gets it right. I find his style refreshing and suitably irreverent while challenging my preconceptions. He also has a sense of humor.

I enjoy learning new things and appreciate authors who express their ideas with clarity and simplicity. Examples based on credible research always helps and Al shares liberally from his research.

I decided to spend some more time with it and thought an otherwise boring Vancouver-Toronto flight could be somewhat relieved by delving deeper into the focus idea. Presto: another musing.

So, without further ado, here is the essence of what Al has to say about focus; what it is and what it's not. I encourage you to apprach this with a critical attitude. The value comes from the challenging thoughts and how they make your synapses fire.

Al Ries' 15 principles of focus

1. A focus is simple

A focus is simple when it is immediately understood by customers, employees, stakeholders or anyone else who needs to understand it. To find the simple focus you need one simple idea, not a lot of ideas. Rely on your judgment to find the simple idea for your simple focus.

My take on this: This is good advice. I recently read about someone who had taken the mission statements from 15-20 of America's largest corporations, removed corporate names and other identifiers and presented them to the CEO's and other top-top executives of those same companies. Guess what, over half couldn't correctly identify their own mission statements. If focus means clarity, I am definitely for it.

2. A focus is memorable

It is memorable if it is unique. So strive to be different. Al recommends that you introduce an element of shock and challenge in how you articulate your focus. Be audacious, he says.

My take on this: Bold can be memorable. Outrageous can be memorable. Trash can be memorable. Just look at the continual strivings of the advertising industry and their products, the ads. What do you want to be remembered for? I would consider style and ingenuity as attributes of that which is memorable.

3. A focus is powerful

Power comes from repetition and momentum. Strive to create a palpable aura around your stated focus.

My take on this: This sounds like the advertising industry's media model with its emphasis on reach and frequency. Nothing wrong with that. What Al adds to this formula is the idea of momentum. Momentum is itself a function of persistence, patience and decisiveness. Sounds a lot like "committment", doesn't it?

4. A focus is revolutionary

A winning focus goes against the grain of conventional thinking and especially against what Al calls "GAMP". As in Generally Accepted Management Principles. GAMP, Al states, will have us think that the road to success is through growth and diversification in a business run by numbers with the price of the stock as the primary performance indicator. An alternative way to consider success is to think of the ultimate business goal as being the health of your business. A healthy business makes a healthy profit and is impervious to competition.

My take on this: At first glance, the basic statement about a healthy business and all that, feels a lot like a "Motherhood and Apple Pie" statement. However, Al is saying that many, particularly public companies, have a very short term focus centered around quarterly results. Now, you're just not going to get away from pressure to perform on a quarterly basis if you are a public company. But that doesn't mean you have to sell out to, or buy into, the idea that the quarter is the only meaningful time frame you should worry about. I think what Al is getting at here is the need to use boldness to make a difference.

5. A focus needs an enemy

A focus leads you on the road towards specialization. For a specialist to be successful, others must fail. So you need to know who the others are. This means you must articulate clearly who and what you are and who and what you are not. The who and what that you are not effectively defines your enemy.

My take on this: Al is not as militant as he sounds. His point is just very provocatively put. My take on this is that focus means you must take a position and be for something. This implies that you will be against other things and that you should accept this. If you try to be over opportunistic by trying to avoid offending anyone at all, you will loose focus and be less effective than you could be.

6. A focus is the future

The future is all about the next generation. About the children who succeed their parents. Al Ries makes the point that without followers there can be no leaders. His recipe is to define the future in terms of today's activities and pick the best product, service or idea that can become a hall mark of the next generation.

My take on this: Another way to look at this is to look at the ration of new to old products in your current line-up. For example, a fish exporter I worked with some years ago concluded that the rate of product change was getting so high that three years hence over 50% of their current products would no longer be marketable. This meant that they would have to crank up their new product development capability to sustain some 15-20% new products every year. More depending upon how pessimistic they wanted to be about new product failures. This is the meaning of a future focus.

7. A focus is internal as well as external

Your focus should guide you in determining what people to hire, what research and development to conduct and what products or services to introduce. Make sure you back that which represents the future.

My take on this: The lesson here is to carry your focus into everything you do. Be true to your idea and act on it, make it count.

8. A focus is what a country needs

Al Ries maintains that what is good for a business is good for a country. Thus a country can benefit from defining a focus, too.

My take on this: Well, I don't think he is wrong, but I do think that the agenda of a country is much more diverse than that of a corporation. I'm not sure that the examples from the corporate context will be very useful in the context of a country. Just a thought.

9. A focus is not a product

A focus is not found in products themselves, but in their attributes or in an aspect of the market. He goes on to state that the power of a focus lies in the mind of the customer. To focus means allowing and fostering imbalances to provide a contrast and a new context for the customer to make new choices.

My take on this: Al could have cut through the fog if he had just come right out and said that focus is about value. Customers buy value. Sure price and quality and so on are important, but they are attributes of value. Just to muddy the waters or thicken the fog, to mix the metaphors, it is the perceived value that counts. I like that thought because it puts a brain in the buying loop. Something the advertising industry seems to forget now and again.

10. A focus is not an umbrella

An overarching concept is not necessarily a useful focus. It attempts to cover too much ground. A focus is a bridge to take you from today till tomorrow under the leadership of an idea rather than by force of personality.

My take on this: Good thing he qualified that with the word "necessarily". A focus is by definition a concept. If it is too wide, it may indeed be useless because you can't operationalize it in any meaningful way. That is not to say you can't be expansive in your thinking and in the formulation of your focus. Here's an example. Have you ever considered the incredible product specter of Canon, the maker of cameras, copiers and printers? The number of models in their various product lines is simply staggering. And more models are coming out all the time in a never endig stream. Can this be good business? Is this focus or lack of it? Are they trying to take over the world? What's cameras got to do with printers?

I will argue Canon is a focused company. Here's why. The core of Canon's products used to be the camera lens. Canon had figured out lenses. So they built their business focusing on the lenses and what they could do with them. Then came photocopiers. They used cameras. So once Canon figured out that a copier was just a different way to take a picture, off they were to the races. You get the picture (pun intended).

Canon's focus and brilliance is the way they found myriad ways to reuse the basic, standard components of their lenses. Sure they keep pumping out products, but not everything is as new as it seems. They also excel in quality management and continuous improvement, but that's another story.

Canon's focus on lenses is overarching in the sense that the lenses form a foundation or core competency for launching a wide range of products. But you can also see how simple and elegant it is.

11. A focus does not appeal to everybody

It is important to realize that some people just want to be different. They will always chose something different form the majority. Accept the futility of attempting to be all things to all people. Specialize. Al Ries argues that a broad focus results in a smaller share of the target market than a narrower focus.

My take on this: This is the "don't try to please everybody" and "find your enemy" arguments all rolled into one. It also suggests why Apple is safe in a world dominated by Microsoft as long as 10% of the market (or whatever) is enough to sustain the business.

12. A focus is not hard to find

The first inclination is often to think that we need lots of great ideas to find the best focus. Finding all these ideas appears to require many people and basically seems a hard thing to do. Not so, says Al Ries. The problem isn't to find lots of suitable people or even lots of ideas, but to find one simple idea only. This is, he argues, not a job for a committee who can onlyİcreate complicated things. Simple ideas come from very small groups of people. Ideally just two; one to think and one to evaluate with the roles bouncing back and forth.

My take on this: Al has a point. I remember reading one of Shigeo Shingo's books many years ago. He described a situation where he and a group of factory workers in Japan had been asked to come up with some improvement ideas to resolve a quality problem. It was late in the day and everybody was worried that they wouldn't be able to come up with very many ideas. Well, after a long session, I think an all-nighter, the crew emerged tired but happy. They had generated some 5000 ideas. Once again, the important thing is to find the good ideas that can make a difference. Personally, I expect those who generate more ideas on a consistent basis to have a greater probablility of uncovering the jewels.

13. A focus is not instantly successful

A focus requires patience. In fact, things may get worse before they get better because to execute your focus you must shed that which is out of focus. This can be a powerful obstacle in publicly traded organization where the attention is so intensely directed at quarterly results.

My take on this: Kind of explains why a good idea can be such a demoralisingly tough sell.

14. A focus is not a strategy

A strategy, Al Ries claims, implicitly assumes that a company can obtain 100% of a market. Since this is impossible, any strategy of this ilk is doomed to failure. A focus implies a narrowing of the business goals to merely achieve dominance of a market segment.

My take on this: I disagree. A strategy does not implicitly assume a company can get 100% of the market. However, companies sure behave as if they can. So in the end Al makes his point well.

15. A focus is not forever

Nothing lasts forever. A focus is no exception. The need to re-focus will inevitably arise. That said, a focus is not a fad or a fashion. Its lifespan can easily be measured in years. Perhaps a decade. However, this can vary from industry to industry. The high technology industry requires more frequent re-focusing than a more mature industry.

My take on this: Sounds like Al is an ecologist and a believer in corporations as dynamic, organic structures. Mutate or die out, Darwin! Jokes aside, the world is changing and we must change with it. That's not a very deep thought to end this piece on, but Al doesn't have more than 15 items. So here we are. Hope you had fun.