Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

June 25, 2012 · 8:40 am

What A Soccer Player Teaches Us About Business

I spent part of the weekend watching the UEFA Euro Tournament.

European football government body badge

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If you’re into the sport of soccer, it’s must-see TV and the matches have, in general, lived up to the tournament’s stature as the best football tournament on the planet behind the FIFA World Cup.  During one of the games, the commentator described a player in a way that triggered an immediate business thought and that’s today’s topic.

The defender was described as having “a lack of pace but always a perfect reading of the situation so he’s quite valuable.”  In other words, he has the ability to read the situation on the field, react appropriately, and is rarely out of position even though he’s pretty slow relative to the other players on the pitch.  In my mind, that’s a good description of some desirable business traits as well.

How many executives do you know that act on knee-jerk reactions?  When they’re right, they’re often ahead of the field or have headed off a problem before it starts.  When they’re wrong, however, they often spend resources chasing markets that don’t develop or betting on new technologies that never pan out.  They end up out of position.

As businesspeople we can’t confuse activity for progress.  Moving quickly is always desirable but moving a bit more slowly while compensating for our lack of speed with a much better understanding of the situation is even more desirable in my book.  It’s not a particularly new thought:  we’ve all heard the fable of the tortoise and the hare and I expect we all know a few folks we’d describe as “slow.”  Slow is, in my mind, a relative thing – if they get to where they need to be because they can analyze a situation and react appropriately within the available time frame, they’re pretty valuable.

How about in yours?

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June 13, 2012 · 9:52 am

Why?

Why did you get out of bed this morning? Habit? Hunger? Bladder issues?

Question mark

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Hopefully the main reason was that you couldn’t wait to get going on what you were going to do today.  Trust me – I’m well aware that not every day can be like that but when the balance between excitement vs. dread over the day ahead tilts the wrong way, it just might be time to rethink things a bit.  The reality is that many of us just keep on doing what we’re doing, feeling lucky to have a job and income, and wait for the weekend to come around.  Thoreau‘s “life of quiet desperation” lives on.

Companies are like that too.   While I don’t share some folks’ belief that companies are people, I do think that they have a certain amount in institutional inertia.  They keep on doing what they’ve been doing, very focused on what that is and how they’re going to do it.  They rarely stop, however, and think about why they’re doing – what’s their purpose beyond making money for the owners/shareholders.

I got to thinking about this as I read the book “Start With Why“, by Simon Sinek.  They quick summary is that the most important thing leaders can do is to figure out why a company or organization exists and why that should be meaningful to customers and others in society. Once you get the answer and you convey it to everyone that touches the organization, the rest of the decisions about what to do and sell and how to do it become infinitely easier.  Marketing, social campaigns, product choices, packaging, everything.

That principle extends to individuals.  We need to think about who we are, what we stand for, be a bit more introspective.  I think some of the unhappiness many people feel when they think about going to work is the dissonance between their own”why” and that of their company (or the lack of one at their job).  How about you?  What do you think?

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June 12, 2012 · 7:41 am

Buying Shirts

If you’ve ever walked through the part of a big department store where they sell men’s shirts (and ties – remember them?), you might have noticed that there’s almost an infinite number of choices.

WASHINGTON - DECEMBER 28: A shopper looks thr...

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At least it seems so to me. Collar styles, colors, patterns, and cuffs are all mixed up in a lot of variations. I suppose it’s the same in the dress department – an overwhelming number of possibilities.  I bring this up because a project in which I’m involved has stumbled into a figurative department store.  The technology is filled with possibilities.  So many, in fact, that we’re at a point where we need to exclude some intriguing avenues just so we can get to the checkout with something in our carts.

Working with highly energized, very creative people has a downside.  They tend to see so many possibilities – all the shirts and dresses – that they’re often running off in a hundred directions while not really advancing.  To a certain extent, that sort of war gaming is critical.  It’s a less formal type of decision tree analysis that many of us like to do.  However, there comes a time when the branches of that tree with less potential or which don’t meet near term goals (and for new ventures that usually includes kicking off revenue pretty quickly) need to be trimmed off.

In this case, what we’re trying to do is to lay out all the possibilities, to look at the possible outcomes of making each choice, to assign values and probabilities to each branch of the tree and to make a decision based on our best guesses and whatever information we already have.  In other words, buy a shirt.  We’ve spent enough time trying things on and holding them up to the mirror.  We need to get out of the store and get to work.  And so do you!

Thoughts?

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