You've probably heard of the elevator pitch—that 60 second sales job that dotcom startup CEOs hone just in case they run into potential investors. But there's another one-minute speech that all leaders in all organizations—but especially CIOs—need to have ready. This elevator speech is the minute that can turn into an hour, depending on the listener's interest, that sells a leader's initiatives and turns them into reality.

You know the scenario. You walk onto an elevator and run into one of your company's mucky-mucks. It's just the two of you, and it looks like you are going to share a few floors together. Your mind is working on some subterranean problem (like budgeting, project problems, funding issues, personnel availability...) when the one who breathes lighter air asks, "What's up?" and seems sincerely interested in your response. What you think to yourself is, "A bunch of stuff that even I am not interested in." Fortunately, what you actually say is, "We are figuring out how to talk to our customers in new ways." A few floors turns into a high-level strategy session.

The ability to deliver a good elevator speech is a sign of a focused executive. Focused leaders can mobilize an organization toward a clearly defined purpose and work tirelessly to ensure that everyone is working on the right road and in the same lane. The benefits of a focused organization are clear. Focused organizations work on fewer things at one time, but get more done over time. Focused organizations are able to react quicker and make fewer mistakes, because they have more senior people directly overseeing the initiatives. Focused organizations spend time talking about projects rather than talking about project tracking. Focused organizations can hold people accountable for results.

Because we live in a complex world, it's easy to get muddle-headed and let our project lists get out of control. This is one of the major impediments to job satisfaction and career success that I see in my executive coaching practice. One of my clients reports to the CIO at a large, well-known financial services company. While working through the focus question, I reviewed his IT objectives. I needed my fingers and toes to count them. This CIO's objectives were really just a compilation of other people's lists (those of the CEO, functional executives, IT employees, IT research analysts/consultants and, last but not least, the CIO). My client thought I was brilliant when I asked him if the organization felt overworked and victimized by too many top priorities. Another of my clients told me that he felt like he was sleepwalking through his organization. He was getting battle fatigue from trying to deliver on ever-increasing expectations.

It's easy to identify an organization that is focused and even easier to point out the many that aren't. What's hard is to fight the uphill battle against organizational entropy and keep a clear, exciting agenda in front of our organizations. Clarity of purpose is elusive in our over-caffeinated world. To avoid a slow, painful death from trying to be all things to all people, the CIO must develop a provocative picture of how IT will enable the company's success. The vision needs to motivate the other senior executives to trade in their proprietary, functional agendas for a piece of a bigger idea. The vision needs to be articulated in a way that allows everybody to see their ends in the CIO's means.

If this sounds difficult, it is. It's hard to say "no" in the right way to senior executives who pay your salary. Particularly if the organization doesn't have a shared view about how the company will compete in the future and a strong conviction about the relevance of IT. If you feel that you are serving too many masters, working your organization too hard and waking up in a cold sweat dreading a new CEO coming in and asking the "What have you done for me lately?" question, here are some ways to focus on your focus:

Establishing a focus cannot be delegated. In fact, it is the only part of your job that nobody can do but you. It's amazing to me how many leaders want to buy focus (via a strategy or planning project) off the shelf by hiring consultants. Hiring consultants to set your priorities is like letting your mother pick your spouse. Input is one thing, abdication is another. You know what is best, and you have to live with the result. One CIO of a large retail company with whom I worked delegated planning to consultants who worked independently with his boss and senior management. Needless to say, the consultants focused on the boss's priorities and the CIO was not long for that job.

The focusing process will take a lot of time. You are going to have to dedicate at least a day a week, probably more like two, for the rest of your professional career. This means you need to prune your calendar of the ankle-biters. These are the numbingly satisfying, low-value activities that take a lot of time but do little to move your organization forward. Examples include screening your e-mail and voice mail, detailed budget and project reviews, most vendor meetings and attendance at meetings where your role is ceremonial. Do what I do for many of my clients. Go through your calendar for the past eight weeks or so and categorize your time based on high- and low-value activities. I can almost always help my clients free up at least a day a week by identifying activities that don't need their involvement and setting limits on the amount of time allocated to others. Then, given your newly established guidelines, have your assistant schedule your weekly planning time and fit in the other activities as possible. Finally, so that you are not interrupted, get out of your office. If you need time alone to think, find a secret hiding place like a conference room, your home or a plane. For meetings with others, meet anyplace but their office.

Developing focus requires a clear point of view. In the words of one of my mentors, "a point of view is worth 50 IQ points." Cut through the complexity by going to the front line of your business and understanding your company from the perspective of your customers, channel partners and the thousands that serve them on a day-by-day basis. My client with battle fatigue renewed his sense of purpose and enthusiasm by getting front-line feedback. He came back to his office with a clear view of reality and was able to define a new leadership agenda for his organization. Visiting the front line will allow you to develop your own sense of IT opportunities and evaluate the other senior executives' IT requests for marketplace relevance. Roughly sketch out your view of the IT strategic agenda, but remember...

The CIO can't do it alone. A shared focus on the IT agenda is the only one that counts. Your job is to take the right people through a wellfacilitated process. You need to have good relationships and feel comfortable leading senior people through a discovery process that ends in specific commitments to dedicate resources and realize benefits. These same people must participate in an ongoing governance process to start and stop projects based on strategic fit, risk and capital availability. Since gaining focus and setting priorities is a process, not a project, just when you think you are done, the environment will change (because of new leadership, competition, financial targets and so on) and the process must iterate once again. If you don't feel comfortable establishing planning and governance processes, get somebody to coach you (but not do it for you).

In my experience, most CIOs do not define their job as maintaining a focused IT agenda and therefore do not allocate their time accordingly. If you are one of the muddle-headed, then clear the underbrush out of your calendar and spend time learning from the front line of your organization and forging consensus with other senior executives about the impact of IT and your respective roles in making change happen. Then get your elevator speech down and share it shamelessly with the rest of the organization. You know you've hit pay dirt when you start hearing the speech echoing off the walls of your offices.