Tag Archives: sports

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.

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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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May 22, 2012 · 10:30 am

The Rule Book

I was watching the hockey playoffs last night and had a thought about business. You might not find that strange given that for several years of my life hockey WAS my business. However, what occurred to me has both broader application and a less-obvious path. It has to do with obstruction.

NEWARK, NJ - DECEMBER 20: Kurtis Foster #2 of ...

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For those of you unfamiliar with the term, obstruction (and its cousins hooking and holding) is what players do to decrease the flow of the game. An easy way to think of it is as a player preventing another player who doesn’t have the puck from skating, obstructing their ability to play. Almost a decade ago, the NHL cracked down on the practice by enforcing the existing rules against it in an effort to improve the flow of the game and allow the more skilled players to show those skills. As one might expect, teams adjusted their rosters over the years to emphasize great skating and stick-handling over the clutching and grabbing that was so prevalent .

Watching the game last night, I was struck by how little free-flowing skating was going on.  Many of the other games I’ve watched during the season have seemed the same.  The rules, or at least their enforcement, seem to have changed.  Which is the business thought.

If you’ve built your team to play the game a certain way and the rules change, how do you compete?  If you’re a media company that’s built on ad revenue for eyeballs, what do you do when the audiences you’re selling evaporate to other channels?  If you’re selling SEO, what happens when the algorithms change and everything you do is now wrong?  Even if you’re in online commerce, what do you do with inventory when tastes change?

Ultimately, I think our success and failure revolves around change management – what happens when the rule book gets modified.  We need to be thinking about that as we bring on new hires – how well have they dealt with change in the past?  We need to maintain flexibility in our planning – why spend money to a budget that’s based on old rules?

I’m sure it’s frustrating to the coaches and managers when they find a different set of rules on the ice than in the rule book.  I know it’s frustrating to find a different set of business conditions and consumer preferences.  What do you do when the rules change?

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May 14, 2012 · 10:13 am

Na Na Na Na

We do food on Friday here on the screed and I’m starting to think we ought to do golf on Mondays since now that it’s golf season I seem to find golf themes to start the week. I’m not sure if any of you watched The Players over the weekend but it contained a fascinating study in psychology. We talk a lot in golf about it being a mental game. Bob Jones, a golfing icon, summed it up perfectly:

MARANA, AZ - FEBRUARY 22: Kevin Na watches pl...

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Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course…the space between your ears.

There was no better example of this than Kevin Na during The Players.  It’s a great business lesson too.  For the uninitiated, The Players is often referred to as the fifth major.  Whether it is or not, it’s a big deal in the golf world and it draws a top field.  Kevin Na is a young (28) golfer who turned pro out of high school and won for the first time not long ago.  He was probably best known for carding a 16 on a hole last year (which he did with great grace and a smile, by the way).  What is unusual about him is that he struggles to start his golf swing.  There’s no way to describe it so I’ll show you:

It’s painful, and what’s even weirder is that once he did manage to swing he was playing well enough to be leading the tournament into the final round.  It’s a great example of how often our worst enemies lie within us, both on the golf course and in the office.  How many of us spend time negotiating against ourselves rather than the other party in a deal and deliver worse deal terms than we might otherwise have got?  How many of us operate without a plan or without regard to data that might prove useful?  How many of us let our fears of failure undermine our abilities to function, despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence (like Na’s scorecard) that says we’re doing well?

Part of our ability as businesspeople is our mental capacity, which includes the ability to shut off our brains when we need to and just let our other skills take over.  To a certain extent, we need to get outside of our heads in order to let our brains function.  I’ve had the experience of feeling as if I’m watching myself give a presentation to a few hundred people, one for which I’ve prepared diligently.  My head got out of my brain’s way.  Hopefully Na, who seems like a good guy, can use this experience to do the same.  How about you?

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