671: What World Cup Football Reveals About Strategy. The Fundamentals Problem

0:02And when there is no vision, the people perish. We choose to go to the moon. If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast, where strategy partners teach you the tools and techniques to solve mankind's greatest problems.

0:45Our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies. It's a free download and you can go to firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. That's firms consulting with an s.com forward slash overall approach and if you are looking to advance your career and need to update your resume you can get a mckinsey and bcg winning resume template as a free download at www.firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume pdf that's www.firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume pdf. Michael you watch a lot of world cup games what are some of the things you may have observed about strategy?

1:38It's actually a myth I watch a lot of sports or tv because I know I say I watch a lot of sports and tv and it's true but it's also not true in the sense that I don't actually watch the shows or the game I'm doing a lot of research it can take me six hours to watch a movie because I'll find something that needs to be researched in the movie like the technique that the director used the way the movie was funded like why was this amazing scene in this movie shot in Prague and not London what is the economics behind it what is the thinking behind it but in all sports I look at two things well three things actually the first one is what is the economics supporting that sport or that team because if you don't have the money to build a pipeline of players who can one day be world-class players, the team is not going to do well.

2:26So when you look at a winning team, you've got to look at what was the economics a few years back. I don't know a few years back, sometimes 10, 20 years back that built this pipeline. The second one, which is very important, is to look at the strategy they're going to use. How are they going to win this game? What kind of plays they're going to select? And so on, I can talk about all of that. But the thing I'm going to specifically talk about, which is the most interesting thing is that if you look at football in particular you can very quickly see whether a team is going to win or lose on average that's not a hundred percent thing when i say win or lose in the long term it's a very simple test and the simple test is do they know the fundamentals so how do they handle the ball can they dribble can they pass can they control can they do it under pressure are they a good team it's good team is important that's very important but the components of a team is the individual players and it's the individual skills and this comes back to business as well if you don't know the basics of problem solving managing people communicating leading finances operations but they all come back to problem solving you don't know the basics you'll do well in the short term maybe medium term but in the long term you'll struggle and you won't know why a simple example in football you can always watch a team whereby they don't have the fundamentals to dribble pass control the ball so what they do is they start taking these long shots for goal from far away they don't have the capability to dribble their way close into the box to take a shorter shot so they try to take these long what i call pot shots.

4:13I see teams doing that. It's a sign they haven't mastered the fundamentals. Now this is not to say they're bad. It's also a question of economics, right? If you live in a country that's quite poor and your domestic league doesn't have a lot of money, it's hard for you to entice the best players to come and play in your domestic league so domestic players are exposed to the best players. And also it's hard to have a good coach that can train people you already have. well that's again economics but it also means you need a country that is willing to go slowly and train on these basic things there are many countries who will say look we don't have the time for this we want to win in four years we're going to win in two years but if you've never had this culture of learning the basics the fundamentals in your country or in your company or in your life you have to start doing at a very young age in football you have to start doing it when you're five years old and you have to wait that in 15 to 20 years you'll have a crop of players who can actually compete we see this with clients as well they want big results going to be the Lionel Messi of their careers but they don't know the basics they don't know why they're doing something if you ask them if you if you ask a client you are leading an org redesign Why are you leading the org redesign?

5:37They'll say something like, well, we want to be more efficient. We want to improve morale. But the reason you're fundamentally doing all those things ultimately is to improve the value of your companies. And if you lose sight of that, it doesn't matter what you do at org design. It's not going to work. It's always about the fundamentals, the basics. You know how to do the simple things. And the most important thing is make sure you know the problem you're trying to solve. I think you've seen this, Chris, and most of our clients we spend lots of time with them focusing on a problem they've identified and they're very hard working and it's very hard to succeed but the lack of fundamentals the lack of focus on fundamentals is a big thing we always need to remind our clients to to give a bigger priority to and especially now with the eye we will see we can weaker critical thinking skills basic foundational skills and it's very dangerous and even people who already developed the skills they did the hard work if they are not using their brain the way they used to it's very easy to lose well i can i can give you a very good example of how a lack of critical thinking skills will impact your ai you want me to do that yes so the great thing about ai which is also its big flaw is that it is very smart it's very brilliant in many ways but it can produce a lot of output right yes so the problem becomes if AI can work 20 times faster than you unless you have a way to check 20 times the volume of output in the time you have to report and make a decision how do you actually do that because you can't just take what ai is doing and roll it out it's going to have some errors because it doesn't understand the context and so on so you have to be able to critically evaluate 20 times more information in the same time frame and it's like anything in the world where you have more data the way you analyze more data is you have to be very good at knowing your subject matter, being a critical thinker, developing hypotheses and so on.

7:59So critical thinking becomes even more important with AI. And I want to add one additional thing here. What happens here, people think that AI improves productivity, but one trap that it is very easy to fall into is you start a lot of mini projects with AI, but you don't have capacity to really check what it is doing so you jump from thing to thing and you you actually don't get more done than if you were doing it yourself and you're also not using some of the skills you could have been using so your skills becoming weaker so you have to be very careful you are not necessarily more productive well the most important thing with ai i would say is never use ai for something at which you are not the expert.

8:45Yes. Because it's really hard, as I said in the previous example, to be an expert and analyze 20 times more information that AI is presenting and doing it in the time you have. But it's actually impossible to do that where you're not an expert because you don't know whether what it is saying is true or useful. So critical thinking is becoming more and more and more important, but it's that principle of football. You've got to know the basics, you've got to know the fundamentals and if you don't master those you can't win a world cup eventually a team will come and take you out for our listeners and clients who love football would you recommend they watch it a little bit differently so they can also learn more from the games i think that asking people to watch it differently is asking them to be something they're not you have to be a naturally inquisitive person to think about these things not just in football but in everything you do Everything you do, you've got to ask yourself, why does it exist?

9:46Why is it successful? Why is this team winning? Are they really winning? Why does everyone like Lionel Messi when he's only won one in six World Cups he's been in? And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but if LeBron James had only won NBA championship, I don't know if we'd celebrate him so much. So those are the questions you have to ask about the world. And you have to think about what is different about the world that you don't understand. that's not just about the world cup it's a way of thinking yes always make your own assumptions about how you think things will unfold and see what happens and then think about where your judgment was not ideal you're welcome and that's how you learn a lot more and generally just being very curious why something is happening in a certain way.

10:39It will make us move faster, it will make some of us more productive, but the reality is there will always be a subset of the human race that will not have benefited tremendously from it relative to the people who benefit the most. And it will always be the case because not all humans are the same. We have different incentives, motivations, energy, and ability and capability to use new advantages that come our way. And let this episode be a reminder about the importance of developing foundational skills and strengthening them and not losing them. As we wrap up, today's podcast is sponsored by strategytraining.com.

11:20If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies as a free download, go to firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And if you are looking to advance your career and need to update your resume, you can get a McKinsey and BCG winning resume template example as a free download at www.firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. you.

11:51Thanks for listening to this episode of the Strategy Skills Podcast. Stay up to date on all of our latest training by signing up for our email updates on firmsconsulting.com. We look forward to helping you develop your strategy, critical thinking, decision-making, and communication skills next time here on the Strategy Skills Podcast.

12:17Thank you.