Designing Strategies: The Blog
Strategy, or Bright, Shiny Objects?
In today’s world, business owners and leaders are inundated with information from all sides: newspapers, magazines, Internet sites, social media, blogs, white papers, news reports, e-mail marketing. It all seems endless – and horribly confusing. Someone is constantly touting their next bright shiny object idea. It might be a new software application, promises of tons more traffic to your web site, a new marketing miracle, an expensive seminar or conference guaranteed to provide the answer to all your problems and dreams. All of these opportunities are little more than bright, shiny objects taking your focus off the truly important things for your business.
Do you read late cartoonist, Bil Keane’s ‘Family Circus’ cartoons in your Sunday newspaper? From time to time they feature one of the children sent off on a seemingly very simple errand – “Go get your brother.” The cartoon then shows an extremely circuitous route taken – riding a bicycle around the yard, climbing a tree, jumping over a fence, playing hop-scotch, stopping to play with a dog, throwing sticks – you get the idea. Instead of just walking straight across the street, the child instead goes far out of his way, distracted by every little thing that catches his eye along the way. That pretty well describes how a business can be affected if a case of bright, shiny objects syndrome is allowed to set in.
Wandering through the business day aimlessly, without focus and direction will take you nowhere that you want to go. It’s similar to making your way through a maze, lots of different directions with an abundance of dead ends. Allocating resources – time, funds and human resources – to dozens of different, unrelated efforts, is not the best investment for success. Having a well developed strategic plan in place to get you from where you are now to where you want your company to be is a far better way to keep your company on track. Strategy based on focus and direction will get you where you want to go, not some bright, shiny new object.
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