Simplicity, focus, and competitive advantage | Managing Leadership

Competitive Advantage: Taking it easy

Bear with me if you’ve seen this anecdote before on these pages: Years ago, a German field commander observed that since all military officers are either smart or stupid, and also either energetic or lazy, it is relatively simple, really, to classify them for assignment. The smart and energetic ones, for example, treat every tasking with equal importance, and they work as hard as can be on all of them. As a consequence, they make great staff officers: devoted, tireless, and, best of all, undiscriminating.

The smart and lazy ones, on the other hand, make great commanders. They prioritize with ruthless institutional selfishness, determining which of their taskings are really vital to mission accomplishment, focusing on those, and, with the most bland disinterest, simply ignoring the rest.

As for the stupid officers, the lazy ones can be tolerated, but the stupid and energetic ones are a grave danger, and need to be discovered and weeded out before they destroy the unit from within.

There certainly is an often missed-organizational lesson in the moral of the stupid and energetic manager, but let’s stick here with that of the smart and lazy one. Managers like this are more accurately seen as disciplined and focused. What, exactly, is their secret?

They have developed command focus. This is the threefold ability, or discipline, to: 1) keep your eye on the goal, 2) prioritize by working only on those activities that advance you toward your goals, and 3) prioritize by ignoring all the distractions which will, intentionally or not, run you aground short of your goal.

Remember, this is really only practical when the validity and efficacy of the goal is inherently sensible and widely acknowledged and agreed. If your organization’s strategic vision and operational goals are only found hanging, impressively framed, in the lobby, then forget it: You’re doomed to drift aimlessly and to wash up on the first reef you strike, confusing it for your destination.

If, however, your strategy and goals are sharp and straightforward, and have the integrity of the informing process referred to in yesterday’s post, then you not only know your goal, but you know what there is to prioritize about - how to identify the fair winds from the foul, and how to trim your organizational sails to them.

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Please be sure to see all the posts in this series:

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