FocuStrategy

The office has a social fluency that demands your constant awareness. If you are looking to grow professionally, your smarts just are not enough. You need to be able to navigate the interoffice and business environment. There are competing interests, ideas, politics, and motives. Miscalculating will set you back.

FocuStrategy is not designed to teach you or bombard you with details. It’s designed to make you think, to provoke your ideas, and to keep you moving forward. Only you know the variables and intricacies—based on your own perspective—of the business or position you are in. What works for one does not always work for another. Personalities vary to such a degree that your perspective and strategy will differ from that of anyone else. Why would you use someone else’s formula, just to have it backfire? You’re smarter than that, and there are way too many variables and possibilities for you to allow yourself to be led.

Once you cease to understand and compete, you jeopardize your momentum and risk falling behind. Attempting to catch up at that point is exhausting. (Think of NASCAR—if you pit for a blowout, good luck making it back to your spot.) This is true both as an overall business strategy and on an interoffice level. Turnarounds are tough and take a long time. They involve capital—both monetary and human—and they involve in-depth strategic planning, creativity, innovation, evaluations, and much more. If we’re talking about you as an individual, much of the same applies. You’ve fallen behind, made mistakes—you need a self-turnaround.

Look, we are all just trying to make it through. Dealing with subordinates, colleagues, and bosses requires a strategy. Whatever is happening out there is not the other person’s fault—it’s up to you to be focused, to be nimble, to be creative, to be prepared, and to have a strategy to take you from here to there through all the challenges in between.

If I had to write a phrase to describe every heading in this book, it would be, “Do not stay still.”