Dear CMO:
A few minutes ago, Roger Federer defeated Andy Roddick in the 2009 Wimbledon Gentlemen’s Singles Championship, 16-14 in the final fifth set. I’m the last guy to pick apart a world-class athlete’s performance at the top of his game and at the apex of his chosen sport’s culture, but an enduring lesson holds here for anyone doing anything important. Thus, the post.
Tennis, more so than most other sports, is absolutely unforgiving. It is a game of complete and unwavering focus. Unlike golf, you are engaged in a zero-sum, winner take all competition, face to face, against your opponent. Unlike boxing, there’s no clinching, rope-a-doping, or dancing around the periphery of the ring. No letting a pitch go to wait for the perfect opportunity, no stepping out of the box. You have to respond to each and every shot your opponent chooses to give you.
Tennis, in short, is a game that requires you think of absolutely nothing but what you’re doing …. not what you’re doing today, or this match, or this set, or this game, or even this point …. what you’re doing with this particular shot, which exists only here and now, in this moment.
In a life of business, where performance is measured over time, tennis gives us another opportunity to explore the “micro drama” of the here and now. We live in an age of extreme multi-tasking. We pride ourselves …. often secretly and sometimes ostentatiously …. on how many emails we get on our collective Blackberries while we take multiple conference calls while we have meetings at the airport on our way to other meetings elsewhere.
More often than not, we are spreading our abilities so thinly that our actual output is very often “good enough,” and rarely “word-of-mouth-worthy.” Multi-tasking may be a necessity, but let’s stop for a moment and give proper due to “mono-tasking” …. focusing on one thing long and hard enough to see it through to absolute completion.
Mono-tasking means thinking of nothing but what’s critical to get done …. finished, completely and resoundingly …. right now. It means not answering the phone, hitting Twitter half a dozen times, checking all ten of your email accounts, or going for a walk to the cafeteria. It means, as Dave Lakhani would say, “fierce focus” on getting done what must be done well. How often in a typical day do we do this? It probably depends on your personality, your function, your company culture and the luck of the draw.
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I had a middling national ranking as a singles player with a first serve that often popped perfectly good tennis balls. (My rotator cuff hurts just thinking about it now.) As a strategic consultant focused on helping clients in marketing and influence strategies, my tennis background has served me well (no pun intended, sorry for that). There are no off days. No “gosh, not getting much done today” days. Days are deadlines, launches, proposals, presentations, and everything needs to have instant impact for the person writing the check. I like this, actually, but then again, I’m used to it.
The real point is that I have the luxury of being able to focus intently on what needs to be done now. Intense focus on the single most important thing is what separates good enough work from great work, and yet it seldom happens.
Focus takes practice. Focus takes hard work and preparation. And sometimes, it takes experiencing what it feels like to momentarily lose that focus when you’re serving at 14-15 in the fifth set.
Regards.
Tags: Andy Roddick, Denny Marketing, influence, Note to CMO, Stephen Denny, tennis, Wimbledon
Stephen,
Very nice post. You are right about the need to focus, all the more critical in a world of continuous partial attention. We need more contrarian voices, and mono-tasking (along with slow marketing) feels like a particularly useful meme for today.
Stephen,
As always, well done. I think mono-tasking is an excellent trait to exhibit, if one is allowed to do so. However, for those of us who run a business, multi-tasking remains the best way to serve our clients. Our staff consultants have the luxury of serving one clients’ wants and needs. However the leaders of business have many clients, including employees, and to serve only one is akin to saving your best serve in tennis for the end-game. By then, however, it’s too late, as your competitor has stolen the game. In the consulting world, that means they have taken our clients.
I agree with Mike, Stephen. (And I love the phrase “fierce focus.”)
This philosophy reminds me of another, related post that ran here a few months ago: “Solve the Right Problem.” This one, too, has stuck with me:
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2009/03/solving_the_wrong_problem.html
BTW Admittedly, I know tennis only as a former sports writer, not as a player, even at the clumsiest levels. But in my mind, every game requires tons of multi-tasking, from various strategies and tactics, to preparing for different opponents, and in the case of tennis, practicing all the different strokes needed to win a match. Then during the match, the competitors’ minds must be multi-tasking in order to be ready for whatever might come. What am I missing here?
To me being single focused is about focusing on but one thing, say peeling carrots or writing or developing one tactic at a given moment. In tennis if you focused on but one tactic, the opponent’s next shot would leave you out of position and unprepared for the return, wouldn’t it?
Nice post, Stephen. There’s also something very rewarding about being able to shut out the interruptions and quieting the “monkey chatter” to focus on completing an important task. It goes well beyond getting the job done, and done well. It gives you an inner rush that comes when you are “in the flow.”
Just wish it were easier to do in the real-world frenzy we create for ourselves.
Lewis: I’m sure we’re going to argue the same point, but the nuance here is that flitting from one issue to the next is not conducive to extraordinary work. One can serve multiple clients effectively by doing excellent work for all of them, but we can’t do excellent work if we never focus on the needs of their businesses. If I spend a solid hour – no Twitter, no RSS, no staring out the window – on a client’s pressing needs, I’ve probably produced the best work possible for them. If I try to manage all of my clients in parallel, plus allow distractions in, I can push the to do list forward, but we both realize the work isn’t as good as it should have been.
In tennis, and in business, it’s about focus – being able to focus on “seeing the job at hand well done.” This doesn’t mean you only work on one thing – it does mean that while you’re working on that one thing, you’re not thinking about something else.
Said another way – specifically with the tennis analogy in mind – if you are angry over the last point’s call and simultaneously weighing multiple options while trying to return a 130 MPH flat serve hit tight to your body on the backhand side in the deuce court, you’ll put it in the net. If you’re thinking of nothing but returning the serve down the line, you’re half-way there. Although that particular serve’s a handful at the best of times.
Never really thought about tennis that in depth. It makes since and I like how it is compared to golf and boxing
I remember reading a recent article about the difference between men and women – women tend to multi-task, and men tend to sequentially single task. In the experiment – wish I could remember which university did the experiment – given the same task, the men broke the task down, analysed it, and work out a logical order to achieve the task by sequential single tasking. The women started several tasks at the same time. Both groups achieved their aims in the given time and to the same quality, although the sequential single taskers finished first.
Tennis seems to me to fall into the sequential single task model – 100% effort and concentration on the single task – then a quick consideration of the options as the other player hits the ball – choose the appropriate single task and execute it.
In business, I would rather the guy across the table was 100% focused on my problems, even if the moment the meeting ends he immediately starts another task mentally or physically.
Awesome.
“More often than not, we are spreading our abilities so thinly that our actual output is very often “good enough,” and rarely “word-of-mouth-worthy.”
What a quote. Through lack of focus we provide thinly thought through half baked ideas.
This article is changing my priorities!
Have you heard the expression “to satisfice”?
We “satisfice” when we don’t necessarily do what’s right, but rather do the first available acceptable thing in the interests of time.
We don’t have the time to research all the alternatives, so we ask a peer what they thought of a vendor or solution. We don’t do our due diligence on a new job candidate, but prefer to check one hand-picked reference.
We’re really very busy. So we do the easiest acceptable option to doing it right.
And that’s the problem. We’re so busy multi-tasking that we’ve often missed the point that quality matters more than quantity, that doing less, better is better than doing more, worse.
Sometimes, the right mantra is “reduce, reflect, re-work.”