Richard Martz, Vice President of Advisory Services here at LWLP, shared the following article with our team at LWLP last week. In his note, Richard made the excellent point that this article is reminiscent of our organization’s attitude: ”focusing on what we do great, and not trying to be everything to everyone.”

Here’s a sample of Greg McKeown’s thought-provoking article, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less:

“Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

We can see this in companies that were once darlings of Wall Street, but later collapsed. In his book How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins explored this phenomenon and found that one of the key reasons for these failures was that companies fell into ‘the undisciplined pursuit of more.’ It is true for companies and it is true for careers.”

Read McKeown’s full article on the Harvard Business Review by clicking here: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/the_disciplined_pursuit_of_less.html