Focus

It is difficult to have a true sense of urgency (discussed yesterday), without focus, another OpenView core value.

In fact, it is difficult to do anything well without true focus.

The tricky thing is, as with urgency, that you can think you are focused, and in fact not be focused at all. 

For instance, you could be focused on a single specific goal, which is good, but then not focus on the specific tactical execution steps you need to take to get there. For true focus and results, you need to have the focus starting with the high level vision, then the goals, and ultimately the initiatives and activities to get there.

On the other hand, you can be extremely focused on a specific set of activities, but lose sight of the forest for the trees and not have a laser focus on the ultimate outputs and goals.

And sometimes we can be misled by increasing focus, while still not being focused. For instance, “I was working on 20 projects. Now I’m working on 10. I wasn’t focused before, I am now.”

Not so…I may be more focused than I was before, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I have achieved true focus.

Focus is also diluted by unhelpful overhead and small activities. For instance, I could have a quarterly goal, and spend most of time on it, but at the same time spend 40% of my time on other activities not related to that goal. How necessary are those other activities? Am I truly focused on my goal if I’m spending 40% of my team on other things?

More broadly, the expansion stage software companies in our venture capital portfolio sometimes are not focused enough on doing a few things very well for specific targets.

The senior management teams may say “We’re very focused on building great software to manage data.” The issue is that “great software” is vague, and managing data is some very big thing that varies significantly based on who is doing it, what data, who the target segment is, their goal for the data, and so on.

For example, managing data at a large enterprise is typically very different from doing it at an SMB.

Focus also happens geographically. “We’re focused on just 10 countries” without deep market penetration in any one.

Making your goals SMART certainly helps to create focus, but at the end of the day, it is a state of mind that you either have or you don’t.

And the more vague your goals, the less defined your target market segments, the less understanding you have of your organization’s core capabilities, and the more things you try to do at once, the more difficult it will be to achieve that state of mind and have true focus.