OR/MS Today - October 2000

October 2000

ORacle

The Football Coach's Parable

By Douglas A. Samuelson

The early autumn air was crisp but not too cold. The sky was clear and blue, and the campus was as pretty as the OR/MS analyst had remembered it. Best yet, the home team was winning — not something you can take for granted if you went to a school more noted for academic quality than for sports.

"I'm glad you talked me into doing this, Joe," he said to his old classmate, now a senior manager in another city. "I haven't been back here for a game in years, even though it's nearby. I'd forgotten how much fun this can be. It sure beats management meetings."

"Yeah, Steve," Joe agreed. "That's my big reason for liking it. It's fun, but even more important, now that I'm in business, I really appreciate seeing competition the way it should be: fair, honest, everything pretty much out in the open for everyone to see. You know who did what and how it came out. Too much of the world isn't like that."

"You got that right," Steve agreed grimly. "We're more prosperous than ever, but our jobs are less secure, mostly because of cutthroat competition — and hype crowding out real accomplishment. It's frustrating, isn't it?"

"Sure is," Joe concurred, "and we don't even have the worst of it. I read another news article about the Russian economy the other day. What a mess! These free-market economists we sent over there after Communism fell apart told them unrestricted competition would solve all their problems. They forgot to mention that unrestricted competition doesn't include hiring thugs to take your competitors' stuff! I used to be against most regulation, too, like most businessmen — until I realized how important it is to be protected against liars, cheaters and goons!"

A cheer erupted from the crowd as the home team's star running back broke though for a 30-yard gain and a touchdown. His teammates mobbed him in the end zone, sharing the excitement.

"Now there's what I like about football," Steve said. "Teamwork and team spirit. We talk about that sort of thing a lot at my company, but somehow the way it feels doesn't often match the talk. Maybe we need more regulation on internal competition, too."

Joe grinned. "You mean, on winning teams, people don't keep tackling their teammates?"

"That's it," Steve laughed. "Well put."

"I can't take the credit," Joe smiled. "About a year ago we had a big management 'team-building' session, with a big-name ex-football coach as the featured speaker. To tell you the truth, I thought the whole thing sounded silly. I thought we'd just hear a string of supposedly 'motivational' cliches, not much insight into what we do. I couldn't have been more wrong! The first thing the coach told us was that strategy and tactics are about 10 percent of leadership, and promoting teamwork is 90 percent. Whether the strategy and tactics part is football plays or business activity, you find people having to improvise all the time because things didn't go according to plan. If your people can act cohesively without a lot of direction, you do much better than someone with more talent but less teamwork."

"Right," Steve agreed. "Another guy I knew here in college, who took ROTC, said the most important thing he ever learned there is that a bad plan carried out enthusiastically by everyone, acting together has a better chance of succeeding than three or four good plans carried out at once, in competition with each other. I wish my senior management had learned that! They're always pushing us to compete against each other, in effect — 'go solve this problem and I'll reward whoever brings me the best answer.' I can't believe that's the best way to do it."

"It isn't," Joe affirmed. "Another thing the coach told us is that some companies have gotten huge increases in profits by taking salesmen off individual commissions and using some group incentives instead. Now their salespeople are much more willing to share information, offer advice about how to handle problems, even refer a customer with an unusual request to someone else who knows more about how to handle it. We've been trying some moves in that direction ourselves, and it's too early to tell, but I'm hearing good things."

"This sounds like Deming," Steve noted. "He was always talking about how you had to eliminate internal competition in an organization to get real improvement in the quality of its products or services. Now I think I see what he meant."

"The coach mentioned Deming and internal competition, too," Joe affirmed. "He claimed he could tell a winning management team from a losing one, even in a company he didn't know at all, just by watching how they came through the door and picked seats. 'Winners save all their competitive fire for the guys in the other color uniform, and losers are totally consumed with jockeying for position,' was the way he put it."

"Some Japanese authority on quality, I forgot who, expressed it even better," Steve recalled. "He said, 'Good managers try to fix the process. Bad managers try to fix the blame.'"

Douglas Samuleson is president of InfoLogix, Inc., a consulting company in Annandale, Va. He is also an adjunct professor at The George Washington University.

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