Why are some of our companies at a high risk for extinction?
It is a sunny and warm afternoon. A couple of birds are faintly chirping in the nearby forest. A refreshing breeze gentle rustles the tree branches nearby. You look straight ahead and see a small fluttering flag a little more than 300 yards away. All is quiet and peaceful. You take a deep breath, focus, and slowly wind up your swing.
And WHACK! You get slammed hard into the wall. The blade of a long black hockey stick slaps you hard across the cheek. And the smirking culprit quickly spins around and furiously skates away. You sigh and crumple to the ground, while contemplating why your countless years of golf experience doesn’t seem to be helping at all in this game of hockey.
Many athletes have a hard time being able to pick up another sport. For there is always a temptation to simply take the skills and techniques that we have already mastered and simply transplant them into a new environment with new rules.
But this doesn’t work. For the calm and concentration a golf pro cultivated actually antagonizes their ability to react quickly and pass the puck before getting tackled. The grip needed to swing a golf club fails to produce the stability a hockey player needs to make a slap shot without falling over. The solitary nature of golf, may inhibit the communication that is so key to a winning hockey team.
If we want to thrive rather than merely survive in the face of change, we need to radically adapt everything that we do to suit this new environment. We need to develop a new set of specialized values and embrace a totally new way of playing the game. Finally, each transition is made harder because we often need to invest in a whole new set of strange and foreign equipment. For if we don’t, we might end up feeling a lot like a golfer who is getting body-checked in the middle of a hockey game.
