FOCUS

Focus is the most critical element of your organization's success. Focus generates purpose, excitement, direction and energy. Everyone must be focused on the organization's goals.

• Focus defines the purpose of your business
• Focus unifies your employees and harnesses the energy of their collective efforts
• Focus ensures that your resources are expended in a purposeful and profitable way

In decades of consulting, we have seen that organizations who lose their focus are destined to fail. Losing focus is the most common occurrence of organizational failure and entirely preventable!

FuturesQuest can help by facilitating a process to develop clearly articulated statements of your vision, mission, strategy and goals as well as the values which define your company's culture and determine organizational behavior.

We call it F.O.C.U.S. (Facilitated Opportunity to Create 'Us' and our Strategy)

What game are we playing? What are our goals? Who is the customer? What do they want to buy from us? What problem will we solve for them better than our competition? Who is our competition anyhow? How will we win? What will we gain as a result?

FuturesQuest will assist you with this critical first step in identifying and clearly articulating your FOCUS throughout the organization. Every new employee will get this message upon hire, and every time the message changes, it is repeated to all employees like an echo from Boardroom to Basement.

FuturesQuest Advisors will:

• Set up and facilitate a FOCUS planning meeting for key constituents
• Guide them to define and solidify their purpose and direction, mission, values, strategy and goals
• Present the completed FOCUS statement in an easy to read graphic format that can be distributed throughout your organization
• Set up a communications strategy to ensure that employees are continuously informed about changing direction and recognized/rewarded for their focus

How does a company lose focus?

Organizations typically grow and become increasingly complex and decentralized. Employees become isolated within their departments from other areas of the organization and most importantly, from where the organization is headed and how they contribute to that FOCUS every day. It's not uncommon! The truth is that scenarios like this one happen frequently because each individual in the organization has their own ideas, interpretations and interests and often do not communicate them clearly to others. Each person is so busy trying to do their job well that they forget they are acting as a team for a common purpose and that continuously sharing information is the key to success.

Let's look at one case study.

The Founders have a tremendous idea. They are so excited they can hardly wait to rush out and secure funds to start their company and change the world (and maybe make a lot of money in the process). They have a passion for their invention or technology and their enthusiasm is the main source of attraction to potential employees. They quickly hire 15 employees and deploy each person to do a specific job which will get the product developed as quickly as possible. Everyone is very intent on their responsibilities and the adrenalin rush of excitement, pressure and deadlines often drives them to work straight through lunch. Everyone is focused on doing their job well. There's no time for meetings. Bob runs over to bounce a suggestion off of Carol who loves it so Bob incorporates it into his design.

The Founders hire a salesperson to start developing business. When they interview Sandra individually in the office, the two Founders say different things about their vision and goals for the company. Sandra is very interested in the product, so she doesn't think much of it. She accepts their offer and immediately starts making calls to research and identify prospects for the product. In her fourth week, Sandra hits the jackpot. She has a potential customer. She brings the prospect in for a meeting with the Founders and Bob, the head of product development. Sandra makes introductions and one of the Founders starts to pitch the prospect with his vision for the company.

Sandra sits stunned as the Founder paints a very different value proposition than what she has been telling the customer. When did that change she wonders and why didn't anyone tell her? Then the second Founder interrupts the first and disagrees with an aspect of what he has said. The customer starts to look uncomfortable. Sandra needs a diversion quickly so she asks Bob to explain all the features and benefits of the product to the customer. Bob launches into a detailed, technical explanation of the product and it is significantly different from what she thought she was selling. How could that happen? The room falls silent and Sandra is embarrassed that she has brought the potential customer into this meeting, and confused as well.

As unbelievable as this seems losing FOCUS is a common downfall of many organizations. Don't let this happen to you!