Swing for the fence

We often point to the All Blacks as a beacon of excellence – their mindset, their work ethic and their extraordinary discipline. Of course, right at the moment it’s the Black Caps who are garnering the attention.

I’ve been occasionally and moderately enthusiastic about kiwi cricketers over the years. Just as they start to look good (like now), they go and set a benchmark for incompetence. They always seemed to have an arrogance unjustified by their performance. And every time the pundits say “but this time it’s different”, it wasn’t.

So I’m not going to suggest that this time it’s different, but I’m hugely impressed by some of the batting talent that’s on display at the moment, and none more so than that of Brendon McCullum. He’s playing with astonishing confidence and aggression, taking the game to the bowlers and dispatching them all around the ground.

The analogy with business is interesting. He gets his eye in quickly – he sees the opportunities quickly and then acts without hesitation. And when he acts, he unleashes all his power. When he decides to hit big, he’s aiming to smash it out of the park. The truly smart thing is that he doesn’t see every ball as an opportunity – there are some he knows he has to leave alone. But his mental setting, as he walks out to the pitch is to hit that ball as far out of the ground as possible. And when he gets that opportunity, he aims for the boundary.

As we start a new calendar year and get ready for a new financial year, what’s our equivalent? Every time McCullum goes to bat, you know he expects to get a century and is aiming to get a double. How high would our expectations for ourselves be if we resolved in 2015 to swing for the fence?

If you want to know about the tools businesses need to swing for the fence, register for our upcoming event here.