Focus Like a Laser Beam: 10 Ways to Do What Matters Most

INTRODUCTION

This book is about focus, jacked up on steroids and at a new level that few have experienced and of which only some have dreamed. You have seen laser focus in action. How is it that a black belt in karate can put a hand through hard wooden boards? How does a team of Olympic athletes come together to create a world-class upset and break all known records for performance? How does a professional golfer apply the most delicate and precise touch to sink a long putt while surrounded by thousands of staring eyes? How does a product development team imbue every move with creativity and fuse their vision to create innovative treasures ahead of the competition? How does an organization become beloved by customers, stockholders, and employees at the same time? The ability to focus helps separate the good from the great in all professions and disciplines. To achieve laser focus, leaders transcend conventional methods and adjust their beliefs about productivity and performance.

Conventional thinking and even tried-and-true practices are not enough. The everyday barrage of tough and demanding business problems consumes leaders; it drenches them with distractions, stress, and the morphing needs and ills that require even the best to move faster than hummingbirds. But humans are not hummingbirds, and they can’t work around the clock to try to keep up. Even if they could, it would be of no use. To conquer the speed of business, like the speed of light, we need new vehicles that attack the problem from a different perspective.

If you looked up the meaning of focus, you would find several definitions. Focus means attention on the right things. Focusing means concentrating attention or energy on something. To focus is to achieve maximum clarity or a distinct vision. When you focus you concentrate on something or a central point. These definitions are all fine, but they are vague and do not offer much in the way of suggestions for action. They do not adequately describe the things that are unique about sharp focus in a business setting. The secrets to achieving focus must lie elsewhere.

Managers meandering through their workday don’t fall in and out of focus without knowing that it has happened. One cannot accidentally focus. Focusing involves intention and choice. Focus and attention are not the same, not by a long shot. You give many topics your attention, but focus on few. General attention is shallow and rests on the surface. Focus is deep and selective. Attention can be passive, but focus is active.

Many leaders know that the usual definitions, tips, and techniques are woefully inadequate in today’s ever-changing global business climate. Even companies with previously stable products, services, and business challenges have to rethink the ways in which they go to market and compete. Leaders are confused. They want to be optimistic and energetic about the future, but they spend much of their time mourning the loss of their ability to manage it all and remain sane. When it comes to the ways in which leaders work, years of past success can become a barrier to future achievement. To realize quantum leaps in results, a leader needs to focus like a laser beam.

Laser beams are beautiful. Each bit of energy is jazzed to the max and moves in harmony. Their complicated inner soul creates an outer appearance that is elegantly simple and straightforward: literally straight forward. Forward an inch wide and mile long. Strong, intense, and determined to reach the target with precision. One mind, one purpose, one direction. And while the laser is not the brightest light in any one moment, it goes farther, farther, miles farther and faster on track. Crazed, long, pure, and smooth.

Lasers are among the best and most practical applications of quantum mechanics. They are special and their properties hold secrets for today’s busy leaders. This book offers a new way to focus that gets its inspiration from characteristics of laser beams as described by professor Mark Csele in Fundamentals of Light Sources and Lasers (2004). Each part of this book zeros in on one goal:

Part One (Excite and Energize) offers leaders ways to improve energy and engagement in the workplace. When employees are energized, they are more interested and better able to focus on what’s most important. Energy is a powerful catalyst for creating focus.

Part Two (Tune Your Dialogue) will help leaders change what people talk about at work. Reality is constructed in conversation; if you want to change the topics, tasks, or projects on which people focus, you need to change how they converse. Work dialogue is the vehicle for focus.

Part Three (Zoom In) details leadership practices that will help you focus on what’s most important and deal with distractions and diversions. To focus, leaders must zoom in close.

The three goals of laser beam focus are simple and straightforward, but they also pack a punch. To achieve focus, you will want to fuel up your organization so it can move with great velocity (energy and excitement) and create a compelling future that takes center stage in work conversations (tuned dialogue). To focus your resources and do things well, you and your team should determine how to best use your precious time (zooming in).

Many techniques support these three goals. This book offers ten that will produce great results with minimal effort. Each chapter explains and highlights one practice. Here are the ways I propose to help you do what matters most:

• Know and feel the power of laser focus: Chapter One helps you distinguish and assess your focus. Examples illustrate how laser focus looks and feels.

• Get intimate with your employees: Connected employees care more about their work, are more focused, and produce better results. Chapter Two makes the case for intimacy at work and offers suggestions for pumping up energy through connection.

• Have fun and be fun: Fun is fun! You can be laser-focused on the business and a lot of fun to work with. Chapter Three offers several techniques that leaders can use to create a work environment that is fun, focused, and productive.

• Relax to energize: Stress and mental fatigue rob leaders of their ability to focus and succeed. Chapter Four offers several ways to enhance your mental capabilities that you can incorporate into your busy day.

• Turn meetings into focus sessions: Leaders often put meetings on the top of the list of time wasters. Intuitively they know that meeting about a project or work topic should improve progress and understanding. Chapter Five explains how you can turn everyday meetings into powerful tools of focus and results.

• Invite a challenge: Laser focus is highly active and thrives on new ideas and healthy curiosity. Chapter Six establishes the value of a challenge and shares several ways leaders can request and receive constructive challenges.

• Huddle: How do the best organizations stay in touch and focused on a daily and hourly basis? Chapter Seven offers the virtues of huddling and shares specific examples for how to make huddles a key part of your managerial practice.

• Stop multitasking: Laser-focused leaders know that multitasking saps their organization of focus, energy, and productivity. Chapter Eight explains why multitasking is ineffective and what to do instead.

• Do one great thing: Many leaders leave the office frustrated that they did not accomplish more during the day. So many distractions get in the way of best intentions. Chapter Nine helps leaders accomplish at least one great thing every day.

• Let go: As goals, projects, and tasks become obsolete, leaders need to let go and use their energy and resources to focus on what now matters most. Chapter Ten makes the case for letting go of the old and suggests ways to know when it is time to adopt and commit to a new focus.

These ten practices can help you do what matters most without requiring you to take on a new management system. Each chapter offers ways to improve focus that fit nicely into any leadership practice. Focus Like a Laser Beam should appeal to many reading styles. It offers the following features:

• In a Nutshell: Each chapter begins with a quick summary of the theory and techniques presented. This section will appeal to those readers who prefer scanning for ideas.

• Key Point: The text calls out major concepts to make them easier to review and recall.

• In the Real World: The final section of each chapter offers examples of how to put techniques into action.

Reflect on some accomplishments that at first seemed impossible, improbable, and out of reach. Perhaps it was a contingency response or a project about which everyone was unusually enthusiastic. You likely shifted into a mode in which you were engaged, zoomed in, and in constant conversation. Diversions stuck out like a double-breasted suit at a Jimmy Buffet concert. A little magic, a splash of luck, and a lot of effort allowed you and your team to cross the victory line. Laser focus taps into the actions and thinking processes that will allow you to recreate this environment without putting your organization into contingency mode or tiring your team.

Laser beams are supercharged, efficient, and endlessly useful. Focus Like a Laser Beam draws on these and other properties of lasers to explore a powerful new productivity model. The techniques and practices are catalysts that complement your daily management and leadership actions. The laser beam model and practices enable you to clarify, crystallize, and energize your direction and effectiveness by catalyzing the three fundamental business resources—vitality, dialogue, and time. Most work environments are awash in a jumble of colors, conversations, and stimuli. Leaders who focus like a laser beam have figured out how to create success using energy, cohesion, and intentionality.

About the Title

I first heard the phrase focus like a laser beam while working for Black & Decker in the late 1980s. Joe Galli was vice president of marketing for the Power Tools Division, and was leading the product development and launch of the DeWalt line of power tools. The DeWalt product line was a big deal, a make-or-break moment for Black & Decker’s market share in the increasingly popular do-it-yourself stores like Home Depot and Lowes. The new products needed to be innovative and comprehensive, beautiful tools designed to meet most every need on the construction site or in the home. To get it all done, Black & Decker needed to develop products faster and better than it ever had. Consumer needs and wants needed to be crystallized into excellent product designs. I can remember hearing Joe Galli say on many occasions, We need to focus like a laser beam. He would pinch his thumb and forefinger together and stretch them out, simulating the straight and narrow shape of a laser. At product team meetings, at company briefings, and during general business conversation, he would repeat, Focus like a laser beam.

I have never forgotten Galli’s mantra and the effect it had on the DeWalt launch. Products were created in record time and to high standards. The DeWalt line was and has been a great success for Black & Decker. Whenever I feel overwhelmed because I have taken on too many projects at once, I remember to focus like a laser beam. Looking back on that time at Black & Decker, I can see that the DeWalt teams had laser focus. The environment was highly energized, great dialogue replaced the usual business banter, and distractions were quickly defenestrated.

My interest in focus grew after working on the DeWalt launch. At the same time, I developed an interest in lasers themselves and quantum physics (from a layperson’s view). What I discovered is that characteristics of lasers can be applied to improve business focus. This brought new meaning to focusing like a laser beam! It is a thrill to share these techniques with you.

Part One

EXCITE AND ENERGIZE

This is the magic of the laser, the concept of

stimulated emission.

—Mark Csele

Lasers work by virtue of an amazing phenomenon known as stimulated emission of photons, which are packets of energy that behave as both waves and particles. Albert Einstein discovered stimulated emission in 1916, but the idea was forgotten for more than thirty years. To create a laser beam, a seed photon is sent down a tube filled with atoms that have been excited by pumping them with electricity or light. When the seed photon passes by an excited atom, the atom emits a photon that is the exact duplicate—a clone—of the first photon and transfers some of its energy in the process. Now there