Ruthless Focus: How to use key core strategies to grow your business
 Subscribe to the Three Star Leadership Blog |
 |
| Contact Wally about coaching, consulting, or speaking to your group. |
Why do so many companies that seem to be doing everything right fall from grace or disappear altogether?
Again and again books like In Search of Excellence and Good to Great, identify the practices of a list of excellent companies as the key to success. Again and again those companies fall on hard times. The practices are good, but somehow those companies get off track.
Failure is not inevitable. In this book, you'll read about companies who have been successful for decades. And you'll learn what sets them apart from the competition.
We call the "secret" ingredient: "Ruthless Focus." Companies that are successful for decades maintain a Ruthless Focus on a single, simple, core strategy and on the basics of good business.
Ruthless Focus drives out temptation and distraction. Ruthless Focus helps you concentrate your time and resources and people and innovation on coming up with ways to be profitable, instead of coming up with one new strategy after another.
Long term competitive advantage and profitability aren't usually the result of a super-sophisticated strategy. They usually don't depend on a radical technological innovation or a patentable idea.
Instead companies that are profitable for a long time build their success on business basics. They create a simple core strategy. They stay with that core strategy until it doesn't work. And they concentrate on business results, not business press releases.
Here are some of the things you'll learn from Ruthless Focus .
- What two questions you need to ask and answer to determine your strategy.
- Why you're likely to hit a bump in your growth curve and how to power past it.
- Five basic strategies you can use as models when you craft your own.
In Ruthless Focus, Tom Hall and I share the stories of more than twenty-five businesses. Stories are how we learn best. And stories are the best medium for showing you what works and what doesn't without limiting your creativity with too many rules.
Here are just a few of the stories you'll find in Ruthless Focus.
How Malcolm McLean came up with an idea that would change the world. You'll learn what he had to do to turn that idea into a profitable business.
How Nucor went from being a car company to making nuclear test equipment to the technology and profit leader in the steel business. You'll find out why there's a pile of bad ideas at every Nucor plant.
How Atkins and Pearce has stayed successful in the American textile business for almost two hundred years. You'll learn what six things they expect from every employee.
How Avnet put together two longs runs of acquisitions over almost a century. You'll learn what three business basics they think are crucial.
And there's much more.
Check out my latest book, Ruthless Focus, at Amazon.
Other Posts about Ruthless Focus
The Story of the BookAnnotated Table of Contents
Keep it Simple, Strategist
Strategy: Staying with What Works
Ruthless Focus on the Business Basics
Theo Albrecht, Trader Joe's, and Ruthless Focus
Ruthless Focus: What about Toyota?
Ruthless Focus: Three Kinds of Crisis
The story of Yahoo's shifting strategy
Tom Stemberg, Staples, and the Two Strategy Questions
How Doing Acquisitions is like being a Fighter Pilot
Learning about Differentiation from Barbeque
Danger, Trader Joes!
Categories: Ruthless Focus, Strategy, books
Tags: Ruthless Focus Strategy Books
There are several examples of how companies that stick to their core like Circuit City, Sun and Sears end up in a tailspin. How can we defend against this? Check out this posting from Forbes and see what one of their columnist has to say. It's titled "Stop Focusing on Your Core Business."
Reply to this
Thanks, Ryan, for stopping by and pointing us to the Forbes column. Let me take this in two steps.
First, the Forbes column by Adam Hartung. It's written to make a provocative point but there are two weaknesses. The first is that he doesn't actually suggest anything. All he does is maintain that "focus isn't all it's cracked up to be."
The second is that he's simply wrong about his core point. He lists several companies, including Circuit City, Fannie Mae, AIG, Lehman, Delta Airlines, etc. and says "The leaders of the above listed great companies weren't stupid, or lazy or so arrogant as to ignore important business concerns."
I haven't researched all the companies on his list, but for the ones I do know, his statement simply doesn't hold up. Circuit City didn't fail because it stayed focused on its core strengths, but because it lost focus on the business basics. I wrote about that in my post, "Good to Crap." AIG and Lehman both gave up the ghost for a similar reason. Same with Fannie Mae.
We wrote about the Delta Airlines history in Ruthless Focus. That's where the premier airlines for business travel became just another airline thanks to a CEO so bad that there's an airline industry award for "Worst Performance by a CEO" that's named for him.
Based on our research for Ruthless Focus we recommend the following.
Develop and simple and effective core strategy.
Focus ruthlessly on that strategy until it stops working.
Focus ruthlessly on the business basics.
If you do that, you have a framework for innovation. You have a framework for developing a powerful company culture. You have the framework for maintaining an excellent and committed workforce. In other words, you have the framework for long term competitive advantage and profitability.
Reply to this
Quality of life is an important factor that gets lip-service only and is adversely affected by this approach. The Europeans essentially close up shop for a month and everyone enjoys their holidays without losing market share. This is the same philosophy as keeping Sunday as a day of rest. Sunday shopping has destroyed the quality of life of the employees who have to work it (not upper management, of course). If nobody worked it, nobody would get the jump on anyone else. This American approach to business is extremely destructive to moral, and as a result, productivity. An analogy - beat an overloaded mule and he will lay down under the load.
Reply to this
I'm afraid I don't understand how your comment relates to the post on Ruthless Focus.
Reply to this
Placed my order a few minutes ago, Wally. I'll comment in a few weeks after reading the book.
Reply to this
Thanks, Ray. I look forward to your comments.
Reply to this