Football Beats Business

Business is tough. So is football or indeed any sport. Why do most people enjoy sport so much and others enjoy watching them? In my view because they can get on with it, they don’t have to spend all there time trying to work out what sport they are in or what the rules are or indeed who they are playing against.  In sport the rules and boundaries etc are visible. Let’s compare a game like soccer with the game of business!
Soccer has:

1. Boundaries
2. Goal posts
3. Scoreboard
4. Referee
5. Defined rules that you get penalised for immediately (sometimes not!)
6. A defined strategy (if any good at all!)
7. Other players that know the strategy or when it changes
8. A support team – manager, coach, etc whose focus is always the teams performance
9. Supporters who give instant feedback
10. A league table that ranks performance constantly

Now, lets compare this to the business game:

1. Boundaries are blurred
2. Not everyone is sure where the goalposts are (they keep moving!)
3. Few accurate performance indicators
4. No referee (visible anyway)
5. Rules are also blurred
6. No Defined Strategy. Strategy is usually within leaders head if at all (rarely shared by the team or has involvement from staff)
7. Strategy is not communicated (especially as it changes). What if you asked individuals in your organisation what is the strategy of our business!
8. The support team are too busy to support the staff do their job better
9. Don’t ask for customer feedback, often it is delayed in the form of sales results
10. Position in marketplace is difficult to access

This might give you some relief to know how tough it is to be in business and to be leading a business to sustained success, and it is. Unfortunately the game goes on. A useful way to help your situation is to have an ongoing story line or a playscript with characters. More on this in the future. If really interested in a playscript then contact me and I’ll send you an article on this.

Meanwhile enjoy the game as much as you can!