Back to Basics

My former boss, a newspaper sports writer in his previous life,  used to tell me all of the time: "If it ain't blockin' and tacklin', we probably don't need to spend much time on it." Football requires that teams effectively employ the basics of blocking and tackling in order to put their team in a position to win. So does business.

Often businesses and people, after they reach a certain level of success, feel a compelling need to change what they did that made them successful in the first place. They were once passionately engaged in doing the basic actions required to succeed in their chosen endeavor and somehow, not doing those things began to make sense. The change in doing the successful basic actions probably did not occur overnight. Failure nor success rarely happens quickly. Instead, the players became complacent doing the day to day actions that resulted in measurable progress and felt that they could surely make things happen more quickly if they would fundamentally change what they had been doing successfully. When this calculated change occurs and things don't work out it is typically the process that is faulted and not the people. After all, they reason that it was the same people involved now as when they were making progress. So if could not be the people, it must be the process. Disillusioned to say the least.

The things that helped to make you successful are they very same things that will ensure a greater level of success, if you get better at those things. Let your competition travel down the road of unproven processes hoping to make light-speed process. There is a reason that the basics are called basics. The basics are the fundamental building blocks to every successful foundation. When you hear companies, large and small, talk about "getting back to the basics" consider just how much they have allowed their foundation to erode  by deliberately walking away from the fundamentals of "blocking and tackling. The negative results are self inflicted wounds that are 100% preventable.

Consider those actions that are basic to the success in your professional and personal life and commit to getting better at those things. Do change, but not for the sake of change. Change by getting better at the basics, not back to basics.