Fertility. Flexibility. Focus.

I was reading a post in Seth Godin’s blog. Seth was talking about going from general to specific and vice versa. Reading widely and reading other people’s blogs can certainly spark off ideas which you can use yourself. You don’t need to agree with everything someone else says. You can find areas of overlap that can reinforce your own ideas and beliefs. You can examine areas in which you disagree and ask yourself why. This will either reinforce what you already know and believe or cause you to reflect whether you truly know why you believe in whatever it is you believe in. Be circumspect in your reading and filter out garbage to find your nuggets of truth.

“Specific is Terrific”. Of course it is. “Generality is banality”. I’m not too sure about THAT. I have come to take with more than a pinch of salt anything that generalizes and categorizes people, behaviours, or reads too much into what is observable. Looking into root causes, not surface manifestations, is more and more becoming my modus operandi.

I would like to present my views on specificity and generality. If you’re one of my subscribers, you’ll know right away that this is going to be something like the way I treat things like “Differences between leader and manager” and other what I call “dead horse” topics.

Fertility

Here, I am referring in particular to good soil. Soil that has all the potential of producing great harvests. We need to build this type of soil into our lives. it doesn’t come easy. It needs to be ploughed. It needs to be enriched. It needs to have rocks pulled out. It needs its plow pans to be broken up from time to time. As a business leader, do I have great depth and sufficient scope? An acre of fertile soil is great. Ten thousand acres of fertile soil is far better. Is your “Generality” known as “Banality” or do people know it as “Authority and Stability”? Are you known to be a leader whose “Wellspring of Wisdom” is so deep and whose waters so fresh that it can reinforce any chosen area of specialty?

Flexibility

Ten thousand acres would tend to give you a wider range of choice as to what you want to do with it. Crops, lumber, livestock, olive oil, managed forest? You could choose to specialize knowing that there are other resources to count on should your chosen specialty fail or conditions arise which make that chosen specialty redundant. Is not the lack of this flexibility the cause of so much outcry over “job protection”?

Focus

Yes, we need to focus, as resources are scarce, so goes conventional wisdom. So, increase your resources! Have a “blue ocean” mindset! You know all this already, don’t you? The power and ability to focus is like having a fleet of helicopters at your disposal. You are able to concentrate and disperse at will. Focus with flexibility, knowing that you have the fertility of good soil to back you up. Have a mindset where you use both broadband search radar and narrow band lock-on radar where appropriate. After all, you need to have the best set of options to focus on, right?

So, there’s my thought for the day! Be fertile, be flexible and be focused today and from now on. Have a great time ahead!

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