"I can't think for everybody." - Bill Parcells
"Technique beats tactics." - Gregg Popovich
“Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.” - Howard Marks
Brook Kohlheim's newsletter links to this Harvard Business Review article by Dorie Clark. As undergrads we went to the Harvard Business School...to play touch football.
A quote, "a full 96% of the leaders surveyed said they lacked the time for strategic thinking...what could account for such a massive misalignment between their stated goals and their actions?"
Busyness doesn't excuse us from thinking.
Companies like 3M assign employees thinking time, something like 15%. Remember that POST-IT notes came from a failed glue. It proved just not sticky enough to become a billion dollar product. Sometimes being less than the best works well.
Assume we knew EVERYTHING about basketball and leadership. The Herculean task would become distilling that firehose of data into something useful. EDITING would be key. And then we'd have to ASSIGN TIME to whatever we wanted to teach, e.g. fundamentals, tactics, the mental game Because we lack time, we'd better learn to use it better.
Rather than running 'outmoded' drills, conditioning outside of drills or scrimmaging, or teaching information we'll not use (Manu Watsa's "majoring in the minors")...we'd gain more by thinking more and doing less.
We can't use everything we know in any discipline. Nor should we try. Less is more.
How can we do that?
- Devote a specific time block to thinking. When is ours?
- Find "wasted time" to cut.
- "Kill your darlings." Get rid of stuff, Marie Kondo style.
- Encourage our students to think and edit, too.
- Study exceptional thinkers (e.g. Charlie Munger, Richard Feynman, Johannes Kepler)
- Learn across disciplines.
- Find a mentor (remember Dr. Atul Gawande hiring a surgeon to oversee his cases and suggest improvements). "That's good AND have you tried _____"
- Give and get feedback. "You stink" is not helpful feedback.
- Consider "checklists" to implement strategy.
- Make technique (fundamentals) our first strategic priority.
- Ask the key question. What does my team need now?