The Road to Perfection - One Week at a Time

The story of the 2007 -2008 New England Patriots is fascinating. Perfection in the highly competitive NFL is a monumental achievement. Like him or not, Bill Belichick deserves credit for driving his team to heights previously unseen.

Listening to the press conferences of Tom Brady, Randy Moss, and Bill Belichick gives some insight into Belichick's strategy. The universal themes include:

- individual achievements are a byproduct of a collective team effort,

- one game at a time, and

- 60 minutes of effort.

To say that New England has all the best players, and therefore should be expected to win every game does not give proper due to Coach Belichick. The renaissance of Randy Moss from his dismal years with the Oakland Raiders to his record breaking performance with New England is a prime example of the Belichick system's genius. The media has embraced Randy Moss as a winner and team-player where previously they cast his as an immature, self-centered brat. Getting an ultra-talented athlete like Randy Moss to "buy in" to the system is a credit to the Patriot's organization.

Belichick is known to be a strict task-master. His practice sessions are known to be intense. The team is expected to use practice sessions to hone their offensive plays and defensive schemes to perfection. The Patriots are typically the more prepared team entering each game and the results speak for themself.

Even the greatest teams have let-downs and underestimate less talented opponents. The Patriots did have a few close calls, but were able to regain their composure and comeback to win their games against the Giants, Eagles and Ravens. These wins can be atrributes to the never panic, "play all 60 minutes" approach. Particularly in the Giants game, you could see the Giants let up and concede the game to the Patriots after the long Brady to Moss touchdown pass. The Giants mental letdown is in sharp contrast to the Patriots focus which seems to intensify throughout the course of a 60-minute contest. The Patriots are at their best during crunch time, similar to how Tiger plays his best golf in the final round. This "killer instinct" which Randy Moss alludes to, separates the Patriots from the rest of the league.

The "one game at a time" speech is cliche. However, unlike other teams which simply give lip-service to this concept, the Patriots embody this principle. Many talented teams look ahead instead of taking care of the business at hand, and end up falling short of their long-term goals.

What can be learned from the 2007-2008 Patriots is universally applicable. These are:

- a positive attitude produces superior results,

- teams working collectively towards goals can outproduce star-powered organizations,

- a focus on training prepares individuals and the team to successfully execute, and

- concentration on immediate tasks produce superior long-term results.

These ideas are not new or novel. However, they are very hard to maintain and execute. The culture Belichick has created to enforce, reward and maintain these principles is what makes the Patriots tick, win and dominate.

Surviving in the Information Age

Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" provides many profound theories. Survival of the fittest and natural selection are two major themes he presents. Darwin depicts the earth as a ecosystem where there is a constant struggle between species for both survival and dominance. Natural selection is the process in which nature favors stronger and better adapted members of a species, thus advancing their cause in the battle for survival.

In the dot com bubble, there was much speculation that traditional businesses would quickly succumb to their newly created Internet counterparts. Traditional businesses were described as dinosaurs unprepared for the new Internet-based economy. Almost 15 years later, the business landscape has greatly changed due to the Internet. However, the traditional corporations have faired much better than their dot com competitors.

Business who have a traditional of success have evolved over time to attain their position at the top of the food chain. They have mastered, or at a minimum managed, key areas such as cash flow, innovation, customer service, distribution and marketing. Most of the now defunct dot-com companies lacked these fundamentals. When the Internet introduced a new level of competition, the more evolved businesses survived. Additionally, many of these traditional businesses found ways to leverage the power of the Internet. In this way, many traditional companies evolved and adapted to the new conditions that the Internet created.

However, we are seeing how the Internet has introduced brand new business species such as search engines (Google), online auctions (eBay), movie subscription services (NetFlix), peer-to-peer file sharing (Bit Torrent), VoIP (Skype), to name a few. These new species are much more harmful to the status quo than the dot com e-commerce businesses were (Pets.com, WebVan, enter your favorite dot-com bust here.) These breeds of Internet giants are not competing with traditional businesses directly, but instead have better understood ways to thrive in the new ecosystem that the Internet created. Billion dollar industries including the recording industry, newspapers and magazines are struggling to survive in the information age and may eventually face extinction.

The Internet reduces barriers and creates massive competition between all businesses. There will be rapid business extinction in geographies (manufacturing in the US?) and whole industries as mentioned above. The struggle to survive will be ever greater for any business. Only those who develop sound business fundamentals, learn to adapt and thrive in the information age, and continue to rapidly evolve will make it to the top of their industries. We are at the very early stages of the mobile and wireless revolution, and this will once again change the business ecosystem and create opportunities and challenges. Some industry leaders will continue to evolve and thrive in a mobile world, and we will also see new business species introduced which currently do not exist.

To quote Greek philospher Heraclitus, "Nothing endures but change." Now more than ever that is true for businesses.