Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

WHEN YOU SHOULD NOT FOCUS There are two circumstances when you may want to “do more” and not focus, at least temporarily. 1. When you need to generate many new ideas. When we start a new task, we often don’t know what the best option will be. In this phase, academic research suggests it’s best to generate and consider many ideas. As Wharton professor Adam Grant reports in his book Originals, “Many people fail to develop originality because they generate few ideas.”32 At a certain point, you must cull your ideas and zoom in on the one that works best. In our book Great by Choice, Jim Collins and I found that the most innovative companies first generated lots of ideas and then killed off the bad ones and obsessed over only a few good ideas.33 You can do the same in your work. 2. When you know your options, but are uncertain which to choose. A manager in one of my executive education programs at the University of California, Berkeley recalled an instance when she had pursued two technological solutions to a product because her team didn’t know which one would win in the marketplace. Eventually, she and her colleagues grew confident that one solution would succeed. Only then did they select that solution and ditch the other. “It would have been disastrous for us to select a solution prematurely,” she noted. “We might have chosen the wrong one.”34