The Alternative Manager’s Guide to Focus

This story is excerpted from the cover story from INSTORE’s January 2026 edition, “The Alternative Manager’s Toolkit” by Chris Burslem.

Challenge/Task: Focus

Traditional Playbook: Most store owners are stout believers in keeping it focused—knowing their niche, perfecting what they do best, streamlining operations, and sticking to proven territory. This “laser-like” approach is seen as essential for success and avoiding the dilution of your attention and resources on less important areas. Anything else, it’s feared, could lead to damaging mediocrity.

The Problem: While focused effort can indeed lead to mastery, it can also blind you to new opportunities. Over-focusing on your core might cause you to miss emerging trends, innovative ideas, or adjacent markets that could unlock new growth. It risks stagnation in a rapidly changing landscape. (Think Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia…) Also, we’re wired to appreciate the novel. Without learning new things and being exposed to fresh experiences, life can become pretty dull.
The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Instead of solely honing your core, adopt a mindset of continuous experimentation—small, low-stakes tests that allow you to explore new directions and see where they might lead. Running deliberate, quick experiments isn’t about abandoning focus but about being open and adaptable, allowing your business to evolve and discover new opportunities organically. Living experimentally and with curiosity is also an inherently fulfilling way to live.

How to Make It Happen

• Set aside small investment resources for experiments outside your main area of specialty—test new ideas or markets in quick cycles.
• Encourage a culture of curiosity among staff—regularly explore “what if” scenarios and low-cost pilots.
• Use customer feedback and data from these experiments to inform whether to expand, pivot, or abandon new initiatives.
• Keep your core stable but flexible—use experiments to supplement and enhance your main business, not distract from it.
• Adopt the mindset of the scientist: It’s not a failure, it’s “data.” View setbacks as valuable learning opportunities. Analyze what went wrong and iterate.
• Leverage diverse perspectives: Involve a range of voices and disciplines in testing ideas, increasing creativity and reducing blind spots.
• A crucial question to ask yourself about experiments that don’t turn out well is, “Am I failing differently each time?” says Steven Levitt, author of the business bestseller “Freakonomics.” For all our talk here about experiments, what we are actually talking about is learning. Fail the same way over and over, and you’re clearly not learning.
• Figure out how to get out of the echo chamber to think differently (meet and befriend artists, engineers, people who see the world differently). Our pattern-seeking brains send us off on old paths, which is why social media sites like Facebook or even Amazon Books that reinforce such behavior and tastes are so dangerous. The goal is to trigger thoughts of “what if” in a field you know so well.