Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the month “July, 2008”

30 Jul 2008
3 Comments

Specialisation and the Power of Focus

Dart by Asif Akbar

Dart by Asif Akbar

I had an excellent MDHub100 work group today. The work groups I think of as being most like AA for CEOs and MDs. A place where you can relax in the company of trusted peers and share your deepest, darkest issues.

It was attended by Paul Feist from Feist Hedgethorne and Zoe Porteous from Boutique Communications. Most ably facilitated again by Fi Shafer from Omega Blue.

A lot of the conversation was about business specialisation. I was arguing that specialised businesses – those with a niche focus – had a number of advantages:

  1. Enforced creativity: you have to innovate products and services to maintain a strength and grow revenues in your chosen niche
  2. Ability to cross-propagate best practice and ideas across clients
  3. Continually increasing expertise/ knowledge in the area
  4. Reduction of noise/ thrashing in switching focus between different areas. One industry/ one niche = one focus
  5. Ability to act as a forum for industry interaction (roundtables/ seminars etc.)

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Posted in Creativity, Focus, Happiness, Management, NLP, Strategy, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , , , ,
29 Jul 2008

Just Seven Things

Dice by Andrew Beierle
Dice by Andrew Beierle

I have Google Alerts set-up for a number of different key words or phrases across the web. I track references to the company I work for, our competitors, our industry etc. I also track references to my consultancy (Scarlet Monday) and to Just Seven Things.

Now the company, Madgex, has very few other references made to it. It’s a construct of the initials of the founding shareholders and they slapped an ‘x’ on the end.

Scarlet Monday has more references as you would expect with the nouns Scarlet and Monday. But not that many.

The results for Just Seven Things however are really interesting. There’s a reason for me using this title for my blog. At the heart of my passion is a fascination for the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. As in you can see in the ‘about’ this blog, ‘The Magical Number Seven’ is the hook that I hang my fascination from. 

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Posted in Communication, Conscious and Unconscious, Game Playing, Learning and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment
26 Jul 2008
4 Comments

The Balance between Focus and Multi-tasking

Out of Focus by Billy Alexander

Out of Focus by Billy Alexander

I commented yesterday on the challenging tension between multi-tasking and focus on GTD Times. I referenced how I use Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow methodology (see blogroll) to enable as much focus as possible during day to day working.

What’s been nagging at me has been catalysed by my reading of Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain Tortoise Mind.  

In the book Guy argues that our ‘intelligent unconscious’ is a sophisticated nervous system that gets to know the world by the idiosyncrasies of our own experience: ‘a brain is plastic: it transmutes ignorance into competence….. categories and concepts are distilled from particular encounters so that, by a process of spontaneous analogy, ‘what I do next’ can be informed by records of ‘what happened before”.

It ‘registers its patterns and develops and coordinates skillful responses’

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Posted in Action Orientation, Business, Control, Focus, Habits and Routines, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged , , , , , ,

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