Dear CMO:
A few minutes ago, Roger Federer defeated Andy Roddick in the 2009 Wimbledon Gentlemen's Singles Championship, 16-14 in the final fifth set. I'm the last guy to pick apart a world-class athlete's performance at the top of his game and at the apex of his chosen sport's culture, but an enduring lesson holds here for anyone doing anything important. Thus, the post.


Tennis, more so than most other sports, is absolutely unforgiving. It is a game of complete and unwavering focus. Unlike golf, you are engaged in a zero-sum, winner take all competition, face to face, against your opponent. Unlike boxing, there's no clinching, rope-a-doping, or dancing around the periphery of the ring. No letting a pitch go to wait for the perfect opportunity, no stepping out of the box. You have to respond to each and every shot your opponent chooses to give you.
Tennis, in short, is a game that requires you think of absolutely nothing but what you're doing .... not what you're doing today, or this match, or this set, or this game, or even this point .... what you're doing with this particular shot, which exists only here and now, in this moment.
In a life of business, where performance is measured over time, tennis gives us another opportunity to explore the "micro drama" of the here and now. We live in an age of extreme multi-tasking. We pride ourselves .... often secretly and sometimes ostentatiously .... on how many emails we get on our collective Blackberries while we take multiple conference calls while we have meetings at the airport on our way to other meetings elsewhere.
More often than not, we are spreading our abilities so thinly that our actual output is very often "good enough," and rarely "word-of-mouth-worthy." Multi-tasking may be a necessity, but let's stop for a moment and give proper due to "mono-tasking" .... focusing on one thing long and hard enough to see it through to absolute completion.
Mono-tasking means thinking of nothing but what's critical to get done .... finished, completely and resoundingly .... right now. It means not answering the phone, hitting Twitter half a dozen times, checking all ten of your email accounts, or going for a walk to the cafeteria. It means, as Dave Lakhani would say, "fierce focus" on getting done what must be done well. How often in a typical day do we do this? It probably depends on your personality, your function, your company culture and the luck of the draw.
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I had a middling national ranking as a singles player with a first serve that often popped perfectly good tennis balls. (My rotator cuff hurts just thinking about it now.) As a strategic consultant focused on helping clients in marketing and influence strategies, my tennis background has served me well (no pun intended, sorry for that). There are no off days. No "gosh, not getting much done today" days. Days are deadlines, launches, proposals, presentations, and everything needs to have instant impact for the person writing the check. I like this, actually, but then again, I'm used to it.
The real point is that I have the luxury of being able to focus intently on what needs to be done now. Intense focus on the single most important thing is what separates good enough work from great work, and yet it seldom happens.
Focus takes practice. Focus takes hard work and preparation. And sometimes, it takes experiencing what it feels like to momentarily lose that focus when you're serving at 14-15 in the fifth set.
Regards.