As I watched the final field goal attempt in the Ohio State – Georgia game in the first few second of the new year, I could hear one of the excellent mentors I had over the years. I’ve been blessed with five and Dave Fouts, a devout and out Michigan fan by the way, used to admonish us to stop planning on winning by a field goal. Bring the world class team, not the bagel boy to ensure that the client selected us. Bagel boy, by the way, was the firms’ acronym for Best Available Guy Locally. His point was; make sure that you put a team on it that would MORE than equal to the task. Don’t leave to chance or heart… know that you were destined to win. This is similar to Tsun Tsu’s admonition to avoid engaging the enemy until you know the battle is won. So Dave, if you’re listening, that’s still good advice!
One quick note on over resourcing, as opposed to excellent resourcing. Making sure that you have resources to overwhelm the problem is NOT the same as having exactly the right team of outstanding people to do the job. A football team cannot add more people in order to win. It must add better people or create them from the raw talent it is able to recruit. I am reminded of Margaret Mead’s words:
“Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Adding run of the mill talent or resources does NOT get the job done, in fact, it often hurts performance. That’s one reason why Redbank is a SMALL band of excellent thought leaders.
Call To Action
Review your critical must win strategic initiatives and make sure that you are planning to win by an overwhelming margin.
1. Look at the resources allocated and ask the question can we afford better?
2. Look at your strategic action plan and ask yourself the question, could we be smarter about what we’re doing?
3. Remember, better does not mean more in a lot of cases. Adding more programmers to a project has been proven to be counter productive for instance.
I hope you found something to apply to your business in this MBR. Let me know either way.
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