Watching the Olympics this week, I've been thinking a lot about focus.  I've been impressed with the single-minded focus of these Olympic athletes.  I find myself wondering what they must have sacrificed to get to the pinnacle of their sport.  Even if they don't a win a medal (and most won't), imagine how awesome it must feel to be the 30th-best alpine skier IN THE WORLD, and to know that you could be #1 if you only skied 2 seconds faster. 

These people are all winners, because in my book, simply getting to the Olympics is an amazing personal victory.  But how did these people get to the Olympics?  Focus.  In many cases, these people are such amazing athletes that they could have played any sport.  But they picked one.  Many of them are smart enough to go to any college in the world, but they passed on (or delayed) college so that they could focus their efforts on training.  These individuals have passed on nights at the movies, eating unhealthy food and spending time with family, so they could focus on being the best athlete that they could be. And their reward is to compete at the highest level of their sport.

Things aren't that different in the business world.  Everyone knows you need to focus.  For any business, big or small, there are more opportunities than you can ever possibly pursue.  Yet for some reason, most businesses struggle to focus.  They see an opportunity around every corner and it's very tempting to pursue all of them. 

Why do businesses struggle to focus?  Because it's hard.  And it means turning down something that you may be good at.  Could Shaun White be a world-class skateboader?  Yes, he could.  But he spent this past summer living away from family and friends in New Zealand so that he could practice his snowboarding.  The result?  His second gold medal in a row.  Shaun sacrificed one opportunity (skateboarding) for another gold medal.



As my colleagues at Novell know, I am always preaching that we need to focus our limited resources on fewer opportunities, and that we need to have the courage to say "no" to ideas.  In our defense, I don't think that Novell is unique in our struggle to focus.  Over the past two days, I've read two blog posts on the importance of focus.  One from my friend Matt Asay in his blog The Open Road, and the other from Bijan Sabet, a Boston-area venture capitalist.  Both Matt and Bijan talk about their admiration for Apple and their renowned ability to focus and deselect market opportunities.  Bijan even quotes Apple COO Tim Cook, who says:

“We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple’s revenue last year was $40 billion. I think any other company that could saythat is an oil company.”

Running a business is hard work.  But at the end of the day, business is just a series of trade-offs among limited resources.  Every single opportunity you pursue has a cost — another opportunity that you do not pursue.  If you elect to pursue all of the opportunities, then you wind up spreading your resource so thin that you ineffectively pursue all resources. 

I've seen this problem at companies big & small.  Before I went to business school, I worked at a supply chain software start-up for two years.  We chased every single customer opportunity from a big auto manufacturer to a large retailer to a consumer hardware manufacturer.  Guess what?  They all had different supply chains.  And we wound up chasing our tail for two years to tailor our product to the deal that was most likely to close that week.  The end result was that we ended up going out of business.

At Novell, we have more brilliant engineers and more great ideas than I ever thought I could find at a single company.  And as a large, public software company, we have a lot of resources at our disposal.  Yet even at Novell, we struggle with the focus issue.  Every good idea has its backers, and we struggle to figure out which ones to back and which ones to let go.  I've seen us make a lot of progress on focus over the past three years, and it's been reflected in our margin improvement.

But I'd say that we still have room to improve.  As a member of the marketing organization, I'd submit that my job and that of my marketing colleagues is to help find the open spaces available to Novell and the market opportunities where we have the best chance to succeed.  Then we need to encourage our engineering colleagues to aim their products at those markets.  And we all need to have the courage to say "no" to those market opportunities where it will cost too much or take too long to succeed.  After all, no one can be an Olympic ski champion and an Olympic snowboard champion at the same time.

How do you drive focus in your company?