Presentation Zen: Steve Jobs & the art of focus

Simplicity, among other things, is a conscious choice between inclusion and exclusion. Often the magic is in what you leave out. But this means that you need to be comfortable with saying no, to yourself and to others. This is not easy to do. In the two video clips below from 1997, Steve Jobs shares his ideas on simplicity and focus while speaking to the issue of killing OpenDoc (a software framework standard), a decision that was not popular for many people at the time. Jobs's explanations about his decision sheds more light on his thinking process and how his quest for absolute focus was paramount for creating a vision and strategy which were clear. The lessons contained in these clips are generalizable to business, management, and leadership

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How We Decide - Great Video Lecture by Jonah Lehrer, Neuroscientist

My Eureka Moment With Strategy - Roger Martin - Harvard Business Review

Do you find that company strategy meetings often descend into adversarial position-taking? Many people complain to me that it's the single biggest block to strategy-making that they encounter. But getting around that block is a lot easier than you might think. The solution lies simply in posing a single question, which I believe is the most important question in strategy. I discovered the question about 15 years ago in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, a town of 7,500 inhabitants equidistant from Green Bay, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota. We had a group of about 10 executives from a mining company in a conference room, split evenly between mine management and executives from head office in Toronto. Everybody had an opinion — i.e. what was true — but given the wide array of experiences, technical knowledge, and organizational interests, those opinions were all over the map. We quickly descended into adversarial position-taking and I could tell it was going nowhere.

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