Perfection In Execution

Hey everyone…Corey here again. Last week I talked to you a bit about how the concept in football of field positioning can be applied to your business.

If you haven’t had a chance to read it, you can check it out here.

This week, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the football analogy and talk about plays, and how the execution of plays is critical in having a successful business.

At SixthDivision we spend a lot of time helping our clients build systems of automation and workflows into their business. We refer to these systems as ‘plays’.

A play can really be broken down into three main elements:

1. strategy
2. design
3. execution

As business owners, we often tend to get caught up in the strategy and design of our plays. We want to be on the cutting edge and designing plays that no one has seen before.

We tend to believe that the key to our success is in the strategy and design, not the execution. In reality, the success of our play is more reliant on our ability to execute a play than it is the play’s design.

In the 1960s, legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi installed a play into his team’s offense called the “Lombardi Sweep”. This play was extremely simple; Lombardi himself described it as “as basic a play as there can be in football”.
Even with the simplicity of the play, his team (the Green Bay Packers) dominated the NFL and made this play one of the most famous in all of the sports.

What made this play so effective?

Lombardi described the play this way: “It’s my number one play because it requires all eleven men to play as one to make it succeed, and that’s what ‘team’ means.”

He also added, ”It is the play that the team knows it must make go, and the one the opponents know they must stop. Continued success with the play makes for a number one play because from that success stems your confidence, and behind that is the basic truth that it expresses the coach as a coach and the players as a team.”

The perfect play is one that is executed successfully 100% of the time.

What Lombardi is describing is the benefit of having a “go-to” play. A play that everyone has confidence in and the team has run countless times. Not every play is designed to score a touchdown every time it’s run. Some plays only serve to gain a first down, a few yards, or even just to keep the defense on their toes.

The Packers, of course, ran other plays during each and every game. Their playbook was filled with plays for every occasion and strategy. But when crunch time came and they needed to put points on the board, you could guess which play they were going to run.

As a business owner, we can get caught up in trying to design the best possible play. The design is important, but ultimately the design exists to serve the execution.

When building plays into your business try to focus on the execution of the play and create something that can be run successfully all of the time. Get your plays installed and start focusing on the execution. Your strategy and design should be influenced by your ability to successfully execute.

After all, success isn’t having the best play design. Success is having a play that the defense (your prospects) can’t stop even if they know it’s coming.

An opposing NFL coach had this to say about the now famous Lombardi Sweep: “It was merely execution, and the defenses were the ones to get executed. Mysterious? Not a chance. Just too damn good.“