The right game

I am an amateur boxer. Nothing very serious. Just a couple of guys in the gym fighting against one of nature's inevitability-a bludgeoning waistline. But rated amongst my peers in the gym, I am pretty good. I have won a few fights lost a few. Mostly won more than lost. But that wasn't always the case. When I first started boxing, I would always start strong. I would throw rapid fire punches as soon as the bell rang, landing few but secure in the strategy that if I landed one good one it would be lights out for my opponent. Inevitable, I would get tired right around the two minute mark of the scheduled four minutes and would end up losing the fight. So what has changed?

While I have certainly built a little stamina over time and my skills have definitely gotten better, none of those improvements are so marked as to justify my increased winning percentage. Rather it is my change in perception of the game of boxing that has contributed to my winning. You see like most boxing enthusiasts, I was taken in by the knock out hype. A Mike Tyson or a Manny Pacqiao happens by once in a generation but then that is what most of us amateur enthusiasts get drawn to. So in my case, I envisioned myself a Tyson like fighter-with a hard right that would floor my opponent in 60 seconds. In reality boxing is nothing like the one off greats make it out to be. It is a sport of timing, of pacing, of carefully managing your reserves and waiting out your opponent. An endurance race. So while I was thinking of the sport as a sprint, it is in actuality a marathon. You don't have to take my word for it. Think about what a prime boxing event between elite fighters entails. Two top-notch athletes that are extremely well conditioned. It would be very hard for one to knock out the other. That is why according to boxrec only about 28% of fights end in knock outs.

As soon as I realized that, my whole outlook to boxing changed, I no longer worked to muster that killer punch but instead worked on increasing my endurance and stamina, my main strategy being to outlast my opponent as opposed to knocking him out. And I saw immediate results. So what was I doing wrong? It is my misconception of the sport that was the problem. And because I had the game wrong, the set of skills that I was mustering were not giving me the advantage I sought. Until I figured out the correct game, I could have worked on that killer punch for eons and not seen any improvements.

Almost every company nowadays has a sizable corporate strategy division filled with top-notch MBA's from the best business schools and with gigabytes of impressive power point slides about where the company is heading strategically. So why are they all not succeeding? Part of the problem lies with the identification of the game. There are whole host of strategy road maps created to enable a corporation understand where it stands. Five Forces, Value Maps, Net Maps all help plot an organizations place in the industry. But an important corollary to this is the assumption that the industry or game is actually the right one. Should a company make an error in identifying the nature of its game as I initially did in the game of boxing, then no amount of power point presentations can improve its competitiveness.