Quotes About Focus

to create great results requires a nearly fanatical dedication to the idea of consistency within the Hedgehog Concept.

Practical Discipline #3: Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

What we did was so simple, and we kept it simple. It

Your mission must meet one overriding criterion: it must be compelling. The best missions have an element of genuine passion in them. Don't set a mission like this: To make and sell athletic shoes on a worldwide basis. Set a mission like this: Crush Reebok.

focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.

10Xers distinguish themselves by an ability to recognize defining moments that call for disrupting their plans, changing the focus of their intensity, and/or rearranging their agenda, because of opportunity or peril, or both.

Reichardt kept people relentlessly focused on the simple hedgehog idea

A Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deeply understanding the intersection of the following three circles: (1) what you're deeply passionate about, (2) what you can be the best in the world at, and (3) what best drives your economic engine.

It is an understanding of what you can be the best at. The distinction is absolutely crucial.

Recognize that getting a Hedgehog Concept is an inherently iterative process, not an event.

And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business cannot form the basis of your Hedgehog Concept.

The problem is not the statistical odds; the problem is that people are squandering their time and resources on the wrong things.

people worried more about the leader—what he would say, what he would think, what he would do— than they worried about external reality and what it could

Do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done. Peter F. Drucker

Effective leaders focus their efforts, keeping the number of priorities to a minimum and remaining resolutely fixed on them. You can't do everything; nor can a company on the path to greatness.

The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more

If you must have more than one priority, then keep it to a maximum of three—any more than three priorities is an admission that you don't really have any priorities.

Kenneth Atchity, president of Atchity Entertainment International, observed that there is a vital difference between managing time and managing work: work is infinite; time is finite. Work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. To be productive, therefore, you must manage your time, not your work. The key question to ask yourself is not "What am I going to do?" but "How am I going to spend my time?

Discipline is the greatest thing in the world. Where there is no discipline, there is no character. And without character, there is no progress. . . .

Setting priorities requires making tough choices as to what is really important. One reason so many people have such a difficult time getting focused is that they also have a difficult time making decisions: they balk at choosing which items will be left off their priority list.

good-to-great companies did not focus principally on what to do to become great; they focused equally on what not to do and what to stop doing.

Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. In

Miller's comment leads to a very important point: Strategy is impossible without first setting a vision.

his mind docketing the important things for future transcription.