Few thoughts on focus

Greg McKeown, writing for Harvard Business Review, in his article The Disciplined Pursuit of Less:

Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

• Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
• Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
• Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
• Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

And Horace Dediu, in his recent article Think Small:

Understanding the “fundamentals” of a product is far more important than having lots of products for the sake of diversification alone.

The fundamentals of a product are knowing its job to be done and thus its requirements which, when well executed, will position it precisely and unambiguously on an opportunity.