My Two Cents: Executing Effectively
He was visibly disturbed about the choice that I had made.
And, before I knew it, coach was standing over me, blowing his whistle and frantically waving his arms. He was verbally abusing me for throwing the "lob pass".
"We scored, didn’t we?", I thought silently to myself. "What’s your problem?"
What I hadn’t realized was that –
I was the one with the problem because I didn’t do what the coach had coached me to do.
Does it really matter whether you throw a "lob pass" when the coach has said to make it a "baseball pass"? As long as you score the point, what’s the big deal?
In any game that you’re playing, when your coach, your director, your boss says one thing and you decide to do the other -- does it really matter?
Yes, it matters! You don’t have a better idea! Yes, it matters if you want to be effective! The HEAD has got to know what the FOOT is doing and the FOOT can’t go around surprising the HEAD!
Imagine if everybody all at once had a better idea; a better idea than the "CHIEF".
Consider the impact of having people breaking rank, questioning strategy, changing the plays in the middle of execution time.
Does it really matter?
Yes, because it doesn’t really work.
He was visibly disturbed about the choice that I had made because it was not what I was asked to do.
Coach had me run the same play again and this time I threw the baseball pass. I made the shot, and I was out of the dog house. But more importantly, I learned a lesson about executing effectively that has been serving me ever since.
That’s my two cents (for whatever it’s worth),
Auguste Roc
auguste@danaroc.com
