Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the category “Management”

30 Jul 2008
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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 , , , , , ,
19 Jul 2008

My Pursuit of Happiness III

Review

This is the main area in other systems (particularly in David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) ) that such emphasis is given to the importance and impact of this regular behaviour.

It’s always been something I’ve struggled with and I don’t really know why. It kind of feels like an easy thing to do compared to having to actually do tasks. I also find it to be an activity which is so easy to get sidelined in. So easy to just quickly do a short task that to come upon during your review……

I want to shift this by applying a structure to the review. A bit like I’ve heard about buffalos only travelling with the slowest in their herd, I want to cull the long tail of tasks by evaluating my accountabilities, projects and My 3 Very Next Actions for each. And then using Mark Forster’s ruthless time assessment (if you haven’t got the time longer term to do something, renegotiate it or drop it), review task ‘doability’

Posted in Control, Focus, Happiness, Management, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment
01 Jul 2008

Goal Setting makes things less Scary

I’ve just come back from our six-monthly strategy away days with the Madgex shareholders. Now these are always good events. We get through a lot of stuff very productively.

This session was particularly productive because since we have tightened the focus of our mission to be the global leaders in job board software and services, our ‘flamenco dancing’ of innovation and creativity has significantly step-changed for the better.

Over the last two days we agreed a set of targets for the five years from 1.2.9. We’re into our fourth year of targets set four years ago which we’ve achieved in each of the years. Now this next set of targets should have ‘filled us with the fear’. We’re talking triple-digit millions. Yet it didn’t.

The reason why I think that it didn’t is that we’ve taken the time to plan the scenarios and imagine what it would be like. We’ve done the sales capacity modelling. We’ve got a big A3 map full of our ideas. We’ve allocated responsibilities and modelled in our heads what it will feel like when we’ve got there.

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Posted in Business, Focus, Leadership, Management, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

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