How To Stay On Top Once You've Reached It
By Steve Kroening
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to stay on top once you’ve reached it? Just look at professional or college sports. How many teams do you see win two or more championships in a row? It doesn’t happen very often. Staying on top is often more difficult than reaching the top – in sports and in business.
So how do you stay on top? How do you maintain that edge that will keep you there? And where should you focus your attention?
Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, is famous for starting every training camp by saying, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” These were pro football players who knew what a football was. So he wasn’t telling them anything new. What he was doing though is a major part of how Lombardi led the Packers to five NFL championships and two Super Bowl victories.
Lombardi was simply reminding his team that the secret to success – and staying successful – is to focus hard on the fundamentals. There’s always a temptation to stray from the fundamentals once you’ve reached the top. It’s easy to develop an ego that says, “I don’t need the fundamentals – I’m better than that.” And it’s even easier to become lazy. But the most common reason people (and companies) don’t do the basics is because they simply forget. They get caught up in the busy-ness of business.
When a company loses its focus on the fundamentals, it begins to respond to events in detrimental ways. My good friend Andy Mayfield, vice president of North Highland Company, a major consulting firm working with Fortune 500-type companies, says companies tend to make “a series of urgent, reactionary decisions that can often be more damaging than stabilizing. An everyday analogy is the tendency of a driver to over-correct and jerk a car back into the road after it suddenly veers in a slick patch. As everyone knows, this quick desperation can cause great damage or even complete catastrophe.
“The same can happen in a company. Instead of just one catastrophe, however, many companies develop an environment of endless, urgent crises that must be addressed – immediately. This cycle can be extremely destructive for leadership and the organization.”
Andy says, “Companies stuck in this cycle of under-performing and over-reacting tend to focus on the next big thing that will solve the company’s urgent problems.” They fail to realize that simply returning to the fundamentals of their business will bring far greater success than trying to pull-off an effective “get-rich-quick” scheme. “Get-rich-quick” schemes almost never work for individuals. And they don’t work for companies either.
One reason franchises are so successful is that they have a fundamental approach to business that can be repeated over and over again. John Hewitt (of Jackson-Hewitt and Liberty Tax Services fame) once told me the main reason franchisees fail is because they don’t follow the system. They don’t pay attention to fundamentals. The same is true for any business – regardless of size.
Amazingly, some businesses do succeed – at least initially – even though they don’t follow fundamentals. In our next blog, we’ll look at how they succeed and what fundamentals they must instill before they crash and burn.
(Steve Kroening writes for Success magazine and publishes www.wisdomsedge.co
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to stay on top once you’ve reached it? Just look at professional or college sports. How many teams do you see win two or more championships in a row? It doesn’t happen very often. Staying on top is often more difficult than reaching the top – in sports and in business.
So how do you stay on top? How do you maintain that edge that will keep you there? And where should you focus your attention?
Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, is famous for starting every training camp by saying, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” These were pro football players who knew what a football was. So he wasn’t telling them anything new. What he was doing though is a major part of how Lombardi led the Packers to five NFL championships and two Super Bowl victories.
Lombardi was simply reminding his team that the secret to success – and staying successful – is to focus hard on the fundamentals. There’s always a temptation to stray from the fundamentals once you’ve reached the top. It’s easy to develop an ego that says, “I don’t need the fundamentals – I’m better than that.” And it’s even easier to become lazy. But the most common reason people (and companies) don’t do the basics is because they simply forget. They get caught up in the busy-ness of business.
When a company loses its focus on the fundamentals, it begins to respond to events in detrimental ways. My good friend Andy Mayfield, vice president of North Highland Company, a major consulting firm working with Fortune 500-type companies, says companies tend to make “a series of urgent, reactionary decisions that can often be more damaging than stabilizing. An everyday analogy is the tendency of a driver to over-correct and jerk a car back into the road after it suddenly veers in a slick patch. As everyone knows, this quick desperation can cause great damage or even complete catastrophe.
“The same can happen in a company. Instead of just one catastrophe, however, many companies develop an environment of endless, urgent crises that must be addressed – immediately. This cycle can be extremely destructive for leadership and the organization.”
Andy says, “Companies stuck in this cycle of under-performing and over-reacting tend to focus on the next big thing that will solve the company’s urgent problems.” They fail to realize that simply returning to the fundamentals of their business will bring far greater success than trying to pull-off an effective “get-rich-quick” scheme. “Get-rich-quick” schemes almost never work for individuals. And they don’t work for companies either.
One reason franchises are so successful is that they have a fundamental approach to business that can be repeated over and over again. John Hewitt (of Jackson-Hewitt and Liberty Tax Services fame) once told me the main reason franchisees fail is because they don’t follow the system. They don’t pay attention to fundamentals. The same is true for any business – regardless of size.
Amazingly, some businesses do succeed – at least initially – even though they don’t follow fundamentals. In our next blog, we’ll look at how they succeed and what fundamentals they must instill before they crash and burn.
(Steve Kroening writes for Success magazine and publishes www.wisdomsedge.co
posted by TM at
17:04
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