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 – distracting and terribly confusing. Someone is constantly touting their next bright shiny object idea, in most cases guaranteed to distract you from a focused strategy that will take you and your firm where you want to be.
These distractions can take many forms. The bright, shiny object might be a new software application, promises of doubling traffic to your website, 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 to move your business forward.
Do you read late cartoonist, Bill Keane’s ‘Family Circus’ cartoons in your Sunday newspaper? From time to time they feature one of the children sent off on a seemingly simple errand – “Go find 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. He is easily 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 object syndrome sets in.
Wandering through the business day aimlessly, without focus and direction, will take you nowhere that you truly 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 with a focused strategy designed to get you from where you are now to where you want your company to be is best. It is a far better method for keeping your company on track. Strategy based on focus and direction will get you where you want to go. Some obscure bright, shiny new object will not get you to your desired destination.
Disco Ball — Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis
