We either love or hate it. Some of us can spend hours immersed in it, others, would rather swim through nuclear waste than even spend an hour trawling it. It’s a turn off, boring and for many, we try and avoid it at all cost.

But what about strategic detail? Strategic detail is not about crossing the ‘t’s’ or dotting the ‘i’s’ that’s proof reading. It’s not about cross checking things in minute detail, that’s auditing. Strategic detail is like looking at a valley of fields in June and seeing more than just the green. You see much more than that. The different variety of flowers, the lack of hedgerows, there are more rabbits than there were last year and how the wind changes the flow of the grasses.

Strategic detail is about looking at your business from a distance, identifying the detail and understanding it’s effects. It’s impact on various departments, customers, staff. It’s ability to either stifle or innovate. You may never touch it, but you need to feel it. You need to know where the detail is and its effect. Then you can decide what detail you get involved in and, of course, that depends on what you see.

As small business owners we have a tendency to get involved in everything or lots of things. We market as if we need to sell to all customers/consumers. We network at all the events that are going on in our area. We get involved in all the aspects of our business. That’s why we never have any time!

Time is limited so we have to be careful where we spend it. Better to focus on the three things your business must do right, no compromise, no cutting corners. In fact, what makes you potentially world class. It’s a case of what are the priorities and concentrating on those.

If you are a design agency, perhaps it’s about fabulous, cutting edge design, recruiting world-class people and marketing. If you design and manufacture innovative products its product development, production efficiency and marketing. If you are a creative it’s your reputation, credibility, bespoke products/solutions and marketing. A restaurant, possibly amazing food, world-class customer experience and marketing!

One observer of the Welsh Rugby team who won the six nations in 2008 said that the key to their achievement was that they identified what the critical success factors were in the game and went out and did those abundantly well. It’s the same for small business. Concentrate on 3 – 5 core things and stick to what you are good at, or, need to be brilliant in and stop worrying about the elements that are not mission critical.

This is a great little video. Thanks to funding universe at www.twitter.com/fundinguniverse for sharing it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6MhAwQ64c0

For those regular visitors, you will have noted some changes are taking place to the blog/website at present. Apart from the obvious, this is all in preparation for the launch of the new e-books which should happen this week if Paypal can get its finger out! You will see those additions very soon

Over the next few days, the site will gradually evolve and this stage of development will be complete. Your comments and feedback are, of course, always welcome. Thanks for being patient over the new books…they are on their way!

I’ve just tweeted this after someone shared it on Twitter. Its useful!

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

A fabulous book and worth the £8.99 price tag. Charles Leadbeater offers an insight into how companies might operate in the future as a result of the switch to mass innovation from the mass production of the past. As he admits, some businesses won’t be affected as much as others, but some of the concepts are challenging, thought provoking and downright fascinating.Â

It’s got me thinking particularly about seeing a small business as a community not a team of people. If he is right and a culture of sharing is just around the corner, thank goodness for that, its about bloody time!