Leaders must put maximum resources behind their biggest bottlenecks or opportunities.
Consider a softball, a javelin and a dart. All are thrown by a human with similar degrees of energy. Of those three which one has the highest likelihood of killing something if it were thrown at it?
- A softball has a decent mass to it but is blunt and not focused. In rare cases (3-4 per year) it tragically causes a death from someone getting hit in the head.
- A dart is extremely sharp (focused) however it has very little overall weight behind it. For this reason it can accelerate quickly like a person acting alone. This had advantages at times but this is why initiatives championed by only one person usually fall short of their goals.
- A javelin (spear) has a point that is sharp though not quite as sharp as the dart yet it has a lot of mass behind the tip of the spear and therefore transfers a lot of the energy it was sent off with to the target.
How focused are your business efforts? How aligned is everyone around this singular focus?
Amazingly audiences typically provide a range of answers. There is however a simple answer and it is the reason that our ancestors hunted and defended themselves with spears. They did use darts because of the speed aspect but those had to be enhanced with a poison on the tip to make it effective.
