Phrase for focusing on unimportant details
I'm looking for an idiom or saying that I could use when people are focusing too much on small details and not seeing the big picture.
A couple that come to mind are "being penny-wise and pound foolish" and "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic". However, the former doesn't fit what I'm thinking of because the present activity might not be wise. The latter implies too much about impending doom.
For example, let's say some company is spending all their time refining a small detail in their product, while ignoring a major opportunity shift in the industry. What phrase could I use there?
Solution 1:
Expending disproportionate effort on trivial matters is sometimes known as bikeshedding, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.
Jeff blogged about the phenomenon in the context of it being a problem on Stack Overflow...
Solution 2:
cannot see the forest for the trees
fail to grasp the main issue because of overattention to details.
NOAD