The One-Word Answer to Why Bill
Gates and Warren Buffett Have Been So Successful
When Bill Gates
first met Warren Buffett, their host at dinner, Gates’ mother, asked everyone
around the table to identify what they believed was the single most important
factor in their success through life. Gates and Buffett gave the same one-word
answer: “Focus.”
I love the clarity of their answer but I am also
concerned by how this can be, to quote Rudyard Kipling, “twisted by knaves to
make a trap for fools.” I am an advocate for focus in work, life and
leadership. However, the subject has a nuance and depth that many people miss.
For a start, most people think of there only being one kind of focus.
Focus as a
Noun.
When people
speak of focus they usually mean having a single goal. It is a static thing, a
thing you have. This kind of focus conjures pictures of Roger
Bannister relentlessly pursuing his goal of breaking the four-minute mile, John
F. Kennedy challenging NASA to put a man on the moon within a decade or, coming
back to Bill Gates, a vision of a personal computer on every desk. The upside
to this kind of focus is clear and compelling: you pursue a single objective
and don’t get distracted along the way; you build momentum as many different
people aligned behind achieving this one goal.
However, there is a dark side to focus as a
noun. It’s what we might think of as the Kodak Problem. Kodak was relentlessly
focused on a single objective—and it almost killed them. They found themselves
caught off guard by the disruptive innovation of digital cameras. Kodak was so
focused on optimizing for traditional film capture and processing that they did
not see or accept the transformation in their industry. This is where the
second type of focus comes in.
Focus as a
Verb.
Focus is not
just something you have it is also something you do.
This type of focus is not static; it is an intense, dynamic, ongoing, iterative
process. This kind of focus conjures pictures of Steve Jobs saying to Jony Ive
day after day, “This might be crazy, but what if we…” until once in a while the
idea took the air out of the room. It’s the constant exploration needed to see
what is really going on and what the “noun focus” should be.
Imagine if the moment you woke up this morning
your eyes focused one time and then never adjusted again. You would be out of
focus all day. Our eyes produce clarity through a perpetual process of
adjustment. Similarly, in our lives and on our teams, it is not enough to say,
“We have our focus!” Rather, and adapting Dwight D. Eisenhower statement, “Focus is nothing, focusing is everything.” That may take the point too far, but it still
makes the point that having a focus is insufficient.
The downside to
thinking of focus as a verb only, is that it can lead to being
overly reactive. It can lead people to making and remaking decisions too fast
for any real momentum to take place. It can result in counterfeit agility where
things feel fast but people aren’t going forward. It can become motion sickness
instead of momentum.
The answer is to
develop and value both types of focus. Professor Henry Mintzberg taught that
there are two sources of strategy: deliberate strategy, where
leaders develop a clear vision and map this to long, medium and short term
goals (focus as a noun) and emergentstrategy, where people respond
to unanticipated problems and opportunities (focus as a verb). It is the
disciplined pursuit of both of these approaches that best enables us to focus
on what is essential. We can plot this on a two by two to see what is at stake.
Here are three ways to combine both types of
focus to ensure we getting the vital few things done.
Ask the
right questions.
Bill Gates said
of Warren Buffett, “I first met him… at a dinner my mother had put
together. On my way there, I thought, ‘Why would I want to meet this guy who
picks stocks?’ I thought he just used various market-related things—like
volume, or how the price had changed over time—to make his decisions. But when
we started talking that day, he didn’t ask me about any of those things.
Instead he started asking big questions about the fundamentals of our business.
‘Why can’t IBM do what Microsoft does? Why has Microsoft been so profitable?’
That’s when I realized he thought about business in a much more profound way
than I’d given him credit for.”
In order
to have focus we need to escape to focus.
As I wrote in Essentialism, “I once attended a question-and-answer session with Bill at the
headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington.
By chance he had just completed his latest ‘Think Week.’ Though I had heard
about this practice, what I didn’t know was that it goes all the way back to
the 1980s and that he stuck to it through the height of Micro- soft’s
expansion. In other words, twice a year, during the busiest and most frenetic
time in the company’s history, he still created time and space to seclude
himself for a week and do nothing but read articles (his record is 112) and
books, study technology, and think about the bigger picture. Today he still
takes the time away from the daily distractions of running his foundation to
simply think. Whether you can invest two hours a day, two weeks a year, or even
just five minutes every morning, it is important to make space to escape in
your busy life."
Know how
valuable your time is.
As Bill
Gates has written, “No matter how much money you have, you
can’t buy more time. There are only 24 hours in everyone’s day. Warren has a
keen sense of this. He doesn’t let his calendar get filled up with useless
meetings. On the other hand, he’s very generous with his time for the people he
trusts. He gives his close advisers at Berkshire his phone number, and they can
just call him up and he’ll answer the phone.”
Focusing on what
is essential is a powerful ability, perhaps the most powerful in a world where
we are so bombarded with distracting ideas, information and opinions. However,
if we want to consistently give our energies to what is essential we need to
develop both kinds of focus. Only in this way can we answer
with confidence the question, “What’s important now?”
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