Chapter 7: Focus

Overview

The essence of strategy is, with a weaker army, always have more force at a crucial point than the enemy.

”Napol on Bonaparte ^[1]

Focus, the generation of superior combat power at a particular time and place, enables a numerically inferior force to achieve decisive local superiority ^[2] and provides an overwhelming advantage when and where it matters most.

Military commanders achieve focus on the battlefield by massing resources ”men, materi l, and firepower ”at critical points and times. The business equivalent of this activity is the commitment of maximum resources ”information, capital, personnel, and physical equipment ”in pursuit of market opportunities. But concentrating resources in one area requires reducing them elsewhere, which invariably exposes weakness. Moreover, shifting certain types of resources is more difficult in some cases than in others. Given these constraints, effective focus requires considerable balance and creativity on the part of the practitioner of maneuver warfare . In addition to balance and creativity, effective focus requires the astute management of information; information can be employed to uncover previously overlooked but lucrative opportunities and commit maximum resources with greater accuracy.

In this chapter, we offer four historical examples of focus and its key components , as well as present-day lessons from the Marines. The German invasion of France in 1940 and Lexus s entry into the U.S. luxury automobile market in the mid-1980s illustrate focus in warfare and business, respectively. British admiral Lord Horatio Nelson s classic naval victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 shows how the willingness to assume certain risks and the use of information enable focus. And the emergence of Harrah s Entertainment in the 1990s as a leading U.S. casino operator exemplifies how the sophisticated use of information can maximize the effectiveness of resources committed to a particular market opportunity.

The Marines high proficiency in focus can help you bring overwhelming resources to bear on the customer s wants and needs. Our intent in this chapter is to use their experiences and some of the lessons learned from our historical examples to suggest ways in which you can dedicate resources to lucrative market opportunities more effectively, manage the accompanying risk, and use information to understand and anticipate customer behavior better than your competitors do.

^[1] United States Marine Corps, Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations , 63.

^[2] Warfighting , 41.