Aiming For The Goal

I was watching the USA vs England Soccer match last night, and could not resist telling my husband my strategic advice for soccer coaches. Why not spend more time just aiming to put the ball between the goal posts? In an average game there are probably 8 shots at goal, 3 are stopped by the goalie, 1 goes in, and the remaining miss the goal completely. Now surely if they tried to aim for the goals, instead of the top right or left corner, they would greatly increase their chances? USA was a perfect example of that – they took a direct shot at goal, nothing fancy, the goalie fumbled it, and it was a goal. The score ended 1 -1, and in future no one will remember that England shot a beautiful goal, and that the USA were lucky the goalie missed.

Then of course I went on to say that cricket is similar, sometimes more focus should be on the “nudge and run” i.e. just hit each ball and take a run. That still gives you 6 runs per over, instead of missing 4 shots trying to get a “6 “or a “4”…

Business and nation building strategy are just the same. Of course we should have the right vision, strategy and plan, but once we have them, we should consistently build, by doing the next right step over and over. We should not decide to redo the entire strategy every couple of years, or each time there is a change of government or minister. Why? We waste so much time trying to find the next “big thing' or most “sexy trendsetting” way of doing things. For example, take outcomes based education. How many years went into changing our schools curriculums, training the teachers, rewriting the text books etc. And now, it has been agreed that outcomes based is not really working, and there is a big move back to the way education used to be.

Of course we should try new things, and always strive to improve, but right now, we have some very clear goals to focus on as a nation – education, job creation, poverty alleviation – let's just make it happen! Forget the workshops, and discussions, forget relooking at the BEE charter again, just take the very good framework that has been set up, and start delivering!!