The New England Patriots realized that if you do not practice your game far in advance with a carefully selected and conditioned team, you may not get the results you need in clutch situations (Halberstam). We’re in a clutch situation – a quagmire, really – right now. Game strategy works best in terrible times. That means, in today’s business terms, planning to succeed at the few important things that make a big difference at crucial times in a terrible business environment.
The three main components of game strategy are pick the right folks early on in your process and continue to evaluate them all the time, practice – plan – in advance, and, finally, speed up the pace. Then, expect results. The game strategy of identifying possibilities and enacting them with long–term focus makes sense, especially when compared to extricating yourself and your team from a quagmire. It also increases your valuation.
PEOPLE
Discipline and strategy go together. It takes discipline to implement strategies and tactics. For Collins (Collins, 34), however, discipline comes earlier. He points to the disciplines of choosing the right people and putting them in the right positions, structuring thought early on to confront and balance the “brutal facts” with the strengths of your organization in three areas: what you can be the best in the world at, what you are deeply passionate about, and economic results (Collins, 24). Then, finally, comes disciplined acting on responsibilities and relentless pushing to achieve results. Discipline early in the process brings success. Focus on people first, then plan (thought in Collin’s parlance), and only then take action.
When you talk about evaluating personnel, one person always comes to mind, Jack Welch. In his book (Welch), Welch talks about all the different charts and curves they used to evaluate senior managers over the years. They finally settled on a chart they called the “Differentiation Vitality Curve” (Welch, 159). The curve broke a management team into three quadrants, the Top 20 (people filled with passion), the Vital 70 and the Bottom 10. Let’s just say you didn’t want to be in the Bottom 10. Over the years, Welch has gotten a lot of bad press because of the Vitality Curve. Dividing personnel according to a curve sounds mechanistic. However, GE’s definition of a “passionate” leader is useful: high energy levels, ability to energize others, edge to make tough go/no go decisions and, finally, ability to execute and deliver on their promises (Welch, 158). Not a bad list. Use it to evaluate new hires. The list and the methodology point to why adopting game strategy takes a while. Start early on when you hire people by looking at how they will work out not just now, but later on when things really matter.
PRACTICE
One statistic tells it all: before Carlos Ghosn arrived at Nissan, middle management spent approximately sixty per cent of their time planning. After he arrived, the ratio changed to five per cent planning and ninety–five percent implementing (Magee, 102). On the day of his arrival at Nissan, Ghosn formed nine planning teams to figure out what was wrong with Nissan. They had two months – later changed to three months – to create plans for Nissan’s turnaround. That was the easy part. The hard part was implementing. Ghosn held the planning teams accountable for actually implementing their plan. Nissan closed plants in Japan (think about that), created a passel of new cars, simplified the management structure, changed compensation and advancement (read that, performance raises and promotion only), drastically reduced the number of suppliers, and tied employee bonuses to global results (Magee, page 94). No more talking about implementing. Now they implemented. The pay–off was huge. Planning stalled at your company? Focus on implementation, not strategy.
PACE
Late in a game with the Houston Oilers, the Bill’s Coach Marchibroda dominated by running their “two–minute” drill. The plan was to score more than once in the last two minutes by running play after play without a huddle. Seeing results at the end of the game, Marchibroda later decided to call the two–minute drill in non–clutch situations as well, completely befuddling the opposition. Bill Belichick’s (the assistant coach at the time for the Giants) response the next time the Giants played the Bills? Slow the game down any way he could. His team practiced little things like taking longer to get up from after a play, messing up the ref’s placement of the ball and taking longer to respond to injuries. Then they worked on actually letting the Bills get more mileage out of their runs, all so they would not go to the air (Halberstam, 285–287). Belichick also installed special defensive plays to confuse the Bill’s quarterback Kelly. It all worked. Slowing down the Bills allowed the Giants to dominate and win. Years later, while coaching at the New England Patriots, Belichick watched the Philadelphia Eagles lose because they did not step up the pace at the end of a Super Bowl game with the Patriots. No urgency at the end of the game led to a defeat.
Pace is part of game strategy. If you are thinking of selling your business in the next three years, for instance, plan to pick up the pace of your sales effort. The competition may not understand until it is too late and probably will not keep up. Valuation should increase as a result. It works in football. It will work for your company.
RESULTS
On 1 April 1981, Welch became Chairman and CEO of General Electric. On 2 April 1981, he announced that GE would “manufacture and sell an industrial robot as the first product of its new factory automation business” (Slater, 70). Welch’s goal was to make things happen at GE in order to increase the share price and margin. He did it by speeding up the pace. He began a restructuring process to dominate a business line, or leave it. Using the one–two mantra (have a market share of either one or two in your business, fix it quickly, or leave it), GE left many businesses, some of which had been part of GE for years.
Where to focus in order to fix a division at your company? Porter’s value chain approach shows where to look. Infrastructure, HR management, technology development, procurement, inbound and outbound logistics, operations, marketing/sales and service make up his list (Porter, 37). Having a look at each of your divisions also makes sense.
The first step is analysis, but don’t let it take too much time. Implementation is the key, not planning. Make things happen. Building upon a mainline company that needed to be stronger, Welch started immediately to increase profits and share price. The rest is history.
References
Collins, Jim. Good to Great and the Social Sectors. Jim Collins. 2005.
Halberstam, David. The Education of a Coach. Wheeler Publishing. 2005.
Magee, David. Turnaround: How Carlos Ghosn Rescued Nissan. HarperCollins. 2003.
Slater, Robert. The New GE How Jack Welch Revived an American Institution. Irwin. 1993.
Welch, Jack with John A. Byrne. Jack Straight From the Gut. Warner Business Books. 2001.