focus

Narrow Your Focus to Find Your Ideal Customer Every company, product manager, sales leader, and CEO should be thinking about their target market. Who would make their best customers? I believe that the parameters used to define target markets are too broad and vague and that efforts to significantly narrow

There are connections in every organization.  Some are easily seen while others are not. But, look closely and you will find them.  In the recent column I wrote for IndustryWeek I examined the waste that often occurs in these connections.  It is in these connections, in the margins, that there

One common instruction many coaches violate is trying to play the along side their players while they are coaching.  This often happens in business and when it does we get the same result – much less effective coaching because you lose your ability to be objective and to be a

How did you spend the first week of the new year? If you were like many people, you spent it doing some pretty common things such as catching up on emails and going to some standing meetings, many of which probably began with people trying to remember why we have

You might be in an organization that is all about the tactical. It’s the “what’s next?”, action-oriented, go-go-go culture. There are certainly benefits to this environment. It avoids inaction and it gets things done; a good idea unimplemented isn’t much value. It is generally pretty focused. It is generally performance-oriented.

There’s a lot of focus on prioritization and rightly so. There are so many things I can get you distracted, not prioritizing can generate a great deal of waste. However, when individuals or organizations decide to prioritize, they often focus on the wrong factors. What everybody wants to prioritize our

In my coaching, many of my conversations begin with a source of frustration by the individual. The source of frustration could be rooted in another person, or a team problem, or in their own abilities. But nonetheless, the frustration is there. This is a good thing. The philosophy that I’ve

Good problem statements define a gap to close. They do not just describe an undesirable condition that you would like to remove completely. Why does it matter? It comes down to when you consider yourself “done”, or at least done for now. David Allen of “Getting Things Done” fame talks

I’ve been in and out of a stand-up desk as I’ve changed offices or moved, but I’ve been an advocate for a long-time. Many people I know use one, including my former mentor when I was at MIT my financial manager Kevin Meyer of Superfactory, who’s be a very strong

So many things can distract us from what the core of our work is all about. Email is often a distraction, but there are so many more – Facebook and Twitter, consuming news whether on the internet or TV, politics inside your industry or company, promotion and self-promotion, and the