Post-Game Analysis in Business (The Art of the Autopsy)

You and your team proposed a project to a potential client. They shot it down. Everyone's feeling a little annoyed about it. So the last thing you want to do is relive that meeting play-by-play, right?  That is human nature. But if you have a tendency to tell everyone to just move on, not to worry and that you'll do better next time, you could be missing a huge opportunity.

In the sports world, coaches often make their teams watch footage of past games. They study what plays worked -- and which could work better with some tweaking. They figure out vulnerabilities. This post-game analysis is key to improving. It's expected as part of practice.

I have written before of how few people apply in work contexts, which is a shame, because application is one of the things that most successful individuals do at work, daily if they can. If one person is actively trying to get better at his/her job, and another is not, it's not hard to guess who will eventually do the job better.

One of the reasons people do not like to practice is that we do not like to dwell on our mistakes. That is understandable, and there are whole schools of thought claiming that managers should focus on people's strengths as a way to coax out better performance.

But even as you focus on people's strengths -- something post-game analysis can also reveal -- you can point out skills and habits that could become strengths with work. A brilliant but brusque person can learn to ask one or two personal questions – that is it, nothing crazy -- in order to appear human before meeting with other humans, and thus knock the ball out of the park more often. Someone prone to getting flustered can learn to pause and employ strategies for gaining time to think (like asking for clarification or someone else's opinion) before giving an answer.

You can also do post-game analysis after things that go right. Understanding why a meeting arrived at a great answer in a reasonable amount of time may help you stage more such meetings -- and that would be a beautiful thing.

Do you do post-game analysis in your line of work?  The importance of an autopsy after a defeat is to truly understand the reasons why.  As a medical examiner would determine the cause of death, you in turn shall explore the cause of defeat.

It is also extremely important to note that a defeat is only a temporary condition.  Also, it may prove that you had taken the very best effort to gain a contract and to go beyond logical financial necessity would have only lead to losses in profit and satisfying the existing customer base.

Treating each customer as your only customer

The chances of any one person getting hit by lightning are something like 0.01 percent, but as they say, if you happen to be the one who gets struck, those odds just went up to 100 percent. There's a business parallel to that bit of fun-with-numbers: One person may represent 0.01 percent of your customer base (or 5 percent or 20 percent), but when they are dealing with you it now becomes 100 percent of that population.

Of course, good people working for good customer service organizations always laser-focus on the individual with whom they are dealing at any given time (at least we hope so). But in the broader thinking of a company, it is typical to consider customers in the aggregate -- whether through policies and mottos like "we give our customers our best every day," or internal company policies like "all customers who claim they got defective units should be offered a refund or exchange."

In the normal course of business planning, marketing and operations, it's usually fine to think of customers collectively. But there are situations when it's better to think and behave as if you have only one.

The one-customer mindset will serve you especially well when there is a large-scale problem. Sooner or later, every business has an issue that affects a large portion -- if not all -- of its customers. Could be a service interruption, a defect or recall, extended stock outage, website glitch or a promotion that backfires. When that happens, the natural reaction of some people and organizations is to run around in a panic, like the sky is falling. I have personally fallen into that trap and found that this disaster-scenario mentality almost always leads to unnecessary (often extreme and disproportionate) stress and distraction, which in turn leads to muddled thinking, bad decisions and bad actions.

Now, when we have an issue that affects a significant number of customers (fortunately those problems are rare) I remind my colleagues, and myself, that if we dwell on the theoretical number of people who might be affected -- that is, thinking of our customers communally and the problem globally -- we'll just be freaking out until the issue is resolved. Imagining a room full of phones ringing, emails pinging and torch-carrying mobs at the gate isn't constructive. But if we remember that each customer only knows and cares about his or her own situation (the "100 percent" anecdote I began with), we are able to calm down and deal with manageable bites.

Instead of worrying that "everyone" is going to be upset, as if all of your customers are in a room together comparing notes, worry about that one customer being upset, because -- unless you're a high-visibility company in the middle of a class action or other PR nightmare -- that's usually the way your customers are thinking. Figuring out, whether philosophically or literally, how you'll handle that one customer will bring clarity and likely lead to the best, fastest and least stressful resolution for all involved.

To be clear, this may not change the inevitable scope or cost of a problem. But again, the individual customer neither knows nor cares about that. One-customer thinking averts panic, converts emotional energy to productive energy and creates the right mindset for coming up with the best solution. Figure out the best way to help your one customer, take care of them, repeat and extend to customers as your only client. You'll find that most of these things don't wind up being as bad as you think they will, and the sky usually won't fall.

Overcoming Fear… and Moving Forward

Fear is the most powerful single factor that deprives you of being able to achieve your full potential.  You experience it most often as a result of your own thoughts and emotional visions, rather than actual real world causes.  In other words, you become fearful of a fantasy – something that just does not exist.

Fear is a cloaked enemy that whispers negative thoughts into your mind, body and soul.  It tries to convince you that you will not succeed and that you cannot achieve your full potential.  These thoughts are deceptions.

The road you are traveling may be a bit scary at times, but do not lose faith.  Do not listen to your fears and the fears of those around you.  Don’t let old setbacks work their way into your present thinking.  And most of all, don’t give up on what’s important to you.

It’s fine to feel a bit uncomfortable.  It’s okay if you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next, or how much you can handle.  As long as you gradually step forward you will learn what you need to know.  You will let go of the scary things that ‘might happen’ and start to see all the great realities unfolding around you.

This is your life and it’s an open road.  Grab the wheel with both hands and keep steering yourself around all the unnecessary fears and uncertainties as they arise.  Here’s how…

Envision and declare what you want.

Regardless of fear or actual real world barriers, whenever you want to achieve something, you have to envision it and declare it.  You have to keep your eyes open and focused specifically on what you want.  It’s simply impossible to hit a target you haven’t declared, or get anywhere worthwhile with your eyes closed and your vision blurred.

The first step is realizing that what you want to achieve is already a big part of who you are.  You may be a novice just beginning a great journey, or you may be a veteran who hasn’t yet realized his/her dream.  Either way, the fact that you haven’t attained your desired result yet doesn’t make you any less of a force to be reckoned with.

In other words, if you want to run a marathon, you are a marathon runner.  You just need to run.  If you want to be a writer, you are a writer.  You just need to write.  It is only a matter of training, studying, and practicing.

Whatever it is you want to do, envision it and declare it out loud:  “I am going to _______.” 

And then start doing it.

Know the consequence staying where you are.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

It wouldn’t be.  Life is movement.  Inaction based on fear not only stops you from achieving, it stops you from living.

Your future depends on what you do today! The fear of failure, or whatever, can be daunting, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the realization of looking back on great opportunities you never took.  Don’t be satisfied with telling stories others have lived.  Write your own story, your way.

Believe.

What you believe either weakens you or makes you stronger.  If you want to give yourself the best gift you could ever receive, believe in yourself.

The foundation of the success you desire is not based on being in a certain place, at a certain level of achievement, or a combination of external factors; it is simply a mindset.  Success is an attitude that comes from powerful beliefs and empowering thoughts.  What you think and believe about your life directly determines how you feel, what actions you take, and what you ultimately achieve.

Believing takes practice, but it also makes the impossible possible.  Is it worth the effort?  Absolutely! 

Take it leisurely, but GO!

Yes, take a step, and another.  Keep going!  Achievement involves lots of doing.  What you achieve is based on what you believe AND what you act upon, not just what you believe.  You have got to take your beliefs and put persistent effort into them.

There is no progress without action.  What is not started today is never finished by tomorrow.  Some of the greatest ideas and dreams die young.  Why?  Because the genius behind the idea or dream fails to GO forward with it – they think about it, but never DO anything about it.

Just remember, no action always results in a 100% failure rate.  So get into action now and begin moving in the right direction.  After you get started every step thereafter gets easier and easier, until what once had seemed light years away is suddenly standing right in front of you.

Accept that failure is possible and necessary.

As Winston Churchill once said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Failure is necessary.  On the path toward success you may encounter many failures, but YOU are NOT a failure!  Failures are simply stepping stones that slowly uncover the correct path forward, one slippery step at a time.  You cannot get anywhere without these steps.

So don’t wake up at sixty years of age sighing over what you should have tried but didn’t because you were scared to fail.  Just do it and be willing to fail and learn along the way.  Very few people get it right on the first shot.  In fact, most people fail to get it right on the first twenty shots.  If what you did today didn’t turn out as you had hoped, tomorrow is a new opportunity to try again and build upon what you’ve learned.

And remember, in the end the greatest thing about your journey is not so much where you stand at any given time, as it is about what direction you’re moving…

Don’t be afraid of facing your fears.  They’re not as scary as you think, and they’re not here to stop you.  They’re here to let you know that what you want is worth fighting for.

What has fear stopped you from doing?  What’s one fear that you know is holding you back?  I would love to hear from you!

Yes, Women can and do make better leaders...

In decades of analyzing exceptional leadership, John Zenger and Joseph Folkman have identified 16 traits required for success. These include integrity, initiative, self-development, problem solving and a drive for results. Zenger and Folkman have made their names and their business by designing powerful tools to test for these qualities and to develop them in high potential executives. That's given them the data to analyze where the qualities are most likely to be found. With regards to the differences in effectiveness between male and female leaders, the results were striking: Women outscore men in leadership effectiveness.

Dr. Jack Zenger that this is due primarily to a change in leadership styles. Moving from a command-and-control style of leadership to a more collaborative model plays, he argues, to women's strengths. Women are better listeners, better at building relationships and more collaborative and that, he argues, makes them better adapted to the demands of modern leadership. For that reason, Zenger concludes, there is no good reason not to promote women.

Asked to explain, therefore, why women have not fared better in the corporate hierarchy, he is at somewhat of a loss. Thirty six percent of men say they want to be CEO, where only 18 percent of women say they do. Women have two jobs -- the notorious second shift at home -- while men, well, do not do quite so much. And Zenger thinks also that boards simply lack confidence in women. Few have ever seen a female CEO and do not recognize that, as Zenger says, women perform better. His message to corporate boards around the world is: Don't worry. Not only can women cope; they'll do better.

None of this is really new. But Zenger/Folkman's diagnostic tools are widely used and respected. They are driven by statistics, not an agenda. And one can't help but feel that even Zenger is a little surprised by his own findings. So the data is useful and important. The explanation of the data, however, leaves room for reflection. The last time I attended a corporate event on this topic, the senior partner of the firm sat through a number of presentations. At the end of the day, he came up to thank me but seemed full of frustration. "The problem is," he sighed, "we just can't get the women to change." On Zenger/Folkman's data, he should not want to.