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Leadership Quote by Marcel Telles

“A company can seize extra-ordinary opportunities only if it is very good at the ordinary operations.”

Have you ever heard this quote? It is similar to the idea that “Luck” is the combination of preparedness and opportunity.

Getting The Fundamentals Right

Hall of fame basketball coach John Wooden famously had his team dribble basketballs up and down the court for hours at a time – a seemingly simple operation for highly paid and highly skilled sports people, isn’t it?

No.

You see these highly paid and highly skilled people are exactly that way because they have mastered the fundamentals – they have mastered the boring parts of their role. And they have mastered them because they do them day in, day out, training their muscle memory so they react in a split second, subconsciously, in the right way.  They knew every inch of the basketball court because they went up and down it thousands of times.

In fact the story goes when Larry Bird was acting in a commercial where he was asked to miss a shot, he made seven baskets in a row before one missed – his automatic reflexes just wouldn’t allow him to shoot a ball that missed.

It’s The Same With Operations

Good operations are the lifeblood of your business – after cashflow of course but operations is what drives cashflow. It’s the day in, day out things our people do that drive profit, customer retention, and growth.

Because of this here’s a key lesson in business – money hides most problems.

When a company is flush with money, for whatever reason (a stock IPO, new borrowing, maybe a good quarter) it naturally hides any problems with its operations and cashflow. Executives might say – “Cash is flowing, so why do we need to keep costs under control?  Why do we need to focus on our processes, our governance, our quality assurance, our… customers?”

But when the money disappears, most problems are revealed.  All of a sudden a company can’t make a payment or growth slips slightly and that reckless spending becomes the focus.  Warren Buffett famously said: “When the tide goes out, you can tell who has been swimming naked.” Which means the tide of money (and in some cases the markets and those who’ve borrowed).  When the tide goes out, those people are revealed.

Luck is Preparedness and Opportunity

Really good opportunities don’t come around every day, but they do eventually come around. If your normal, day to day operations are sloppy and your company takes over another company (or hires 300 more staff, or releases more key products etc) they are more likely to fall over, be managed badly, struggle with the change and eventually disappear.

But get the fundamentals right, like dribbling a basketball, and you can do the great things better, and for longer too.

– David McLachlan

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