Richard Lummis and I are back for another episode of 12 O’Clock High, a podcast on business leadership. Today, we take up the issue of what is ‘focused leadership’. Our podcast is based on the Harvard Business Review article, The Focused Leader by Dan Goldman, who notes “A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. When we speak about being focused, we commonly mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. But a wealth of recent research in neuroscience shows that we focus in many ways, for different purposes, drawing on different neural pathways—some of which work in concert, while others tend to stand in opposition. Grouping these modes of attention into three broad buckets—focusing on yourself, focusing on others, and focusing on the wider world—sheds new light on the practice of many essential leadership skills.” Richard Lummis and Tom Fox break it down for you. It consists of self-awareness, self-control, the empathy triad and building relationships. We look at it in the context of long-term strategy, innovation and system awareness.