Focus Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Focus

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Zusammenfassung von Focus

Name: Focus
Rating: 4 (45 reviews)
Author: Al Ries

Al Ries

The Future of Your Company Depends on It

4 (45 Bewertungen)

19 Min.

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Focus Effectiveness Success

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Focus
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Kernaussage 1 von 9

What’s in it for me? Learn why the strongest asset of a company is its focus.

It seems to make perfect sense that the primary objective of most companies is growth. However, being a large, ever-growing company won’t increase the odds of success – in fact, it often reduces them.

In Focus, Al Ries explains how a company’s emphasis on growth can be its Achilles’ heel. The book will show you how “going global” with your company can be the death of it, and how keeping in step with technological changes is often essential to a company’s survival.

Drawing from a wealth of examples, Ries presents the many common ways in which a company can develop its focus – for instance, by specializing – and in doing so increase its chances of succeeding in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

The primary objective of companies is usually growth.

Whether it’s a family-run bakery wanting to open a second location or a massive fast-food company aiming for total market domination, it seems that the one thing common to all businesses is their desire to grow.

But have you ever questioned why companies are so fixated on growth?

One reason is that growing will give them cost advantages.

Certain company costs are fixed – they don’t change if the company increases its production – so the costs per unit decrease as the amount of units produced increases.

For example, a bakery has variable costs for flour, yeast and other ingredients, and they vary according to the amount of bread it produces. It also has fixed costs, like the money it spent on its oven.

Let’s say the oven cost $500 and the ingredients for one loaf of bread cost $1. If the bakery produces 100 loaves of bread, the fixed costs per loaf of bread are $500/100 = $5. So with the variable costs of $1, one loaf of bread would cost the bakery $6 if the total amount of loaves produced was 100. If the amount of loaves produced was 500, the costs for one loaf would sink to $2.

Obviously, such cost advantages give companies a competitive edge. With lower costs, their products can be sold at more attractive prices, thus more customers are likely to buy them.

Another reason that companies seek growth is that managers want to exploit the benefits that size brings (e.g., cost advantages). Naturally, managers want their company to make big profits, so it’s only logical they’d aim to increase revenues and decrease costs.

This is why managers make growth the primary objective of companies. Take, for example, Wayne Calloway, who said during his time as CEO of PepsiCo that they’re fully committed to high (15 percent) long-term growth. To this end, PepsiCo focused on growth, and Calloway and his predecessors worked towards this goal by buying a number of companies.

Being a large, ever-growing company doesn’t guarantee success.

It’s a popular belief that the larger the company, the more value it has. But is that really true?

Sometimes, in fact, big companies with higher revenue have a lower value on the stock market than their smaller counterparts.

Companies become unfocused by management strategies aimed at growth.

As we’ve seen, managers want to expand their companies so they can exploit the benefits of size. Luckily for them, there are several strategies to achieve exactly that.

One of these strategies is line extension. This means that a company expands to sell a variety of other products while using an already established brand name.

Globalization helps companies to expand their business on a global scale, but this can cause a company to lose focus.

Nowadays it’s rare to find companies which operate only in one national market. Increasingly, most companies, big and small, follow the trend of globalization.

This is not surprising, as it’s now easier than ever for companies to trade globally. One reason for this is that globalization dismantles trade barriers. Treaties such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) effectively eliminate high tariffs and other trade barriers that can make importing and exporting expensive for companies. For example, NAFTA is an agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico that lifts tariffs on trade and enables companies to trade freely.

Specialization is an effective strategy to focus your company and improve performance.

So by now you’ve learned about how companies become unfocused and how that’s bad for them.

But is there a remedy? In other words, how do you refocus a company?

Specialized companies perform better because customers view them as providers of high quality.

If you had a medical problem, like heart disease, would you go to a general practitioner or a cardiologist? Most people would chose the cardiologist of course, because medical specialists usually know more about their specialty than a general practitioner would.

And the same thing happens in business: customers prefer to use specialized companies because they trust their products to have the best quality.

New technologies change the market, so you should be prepared to adapt your company’s focus accordingly.

Have you ever noticed something in your life that remained completely the same, forever?

No?

A single company needs a single focus, while a conglomerate needs a multi-step focus.

So far we’ve only discussed companies which have a single focus and perform excellently.

But there are also large conglomerates, with several brands, that don’t have a single focus and are still well positioned.

Final Summary

The key message in this book:

Although growth is usually the main goal of a company, it can often cause a company to lose its most important asset: its focus. Globalizing a company can diminish its focus, but specialization can often save a company. Also, specializing will help a company to succeed, because consumers are more likely to perceive that company’s service or product as being of higher quality.

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Worum geht es in Focus?

Focus (1996) describes how corporations in America lose profits by focusing on growth. It explains what the leading management strategies of corporations are and why they are wrong. Additionally, it elaborates on what strategies corporations should adopt instead, and how they can focus their company for greater success.

Wer Focus lesen sollte

Anyone managing a company that they want to perform better
Anyone interested in why certain companies succeed and others fail

Über den Autor

Al Ries is a marketing professional and author. He founded a successful consulting firm and has written a number of bestselling books, such as The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.

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