Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

The other day I talked about the UT Longhorns’ football season, and previewed their appearance in the Holiday Bowl, in terms of the cost of high expectations. The most memorable (read: bizarre) play from the Holiday Bowl game came when a Longhorn staffer named Chris Jessie — he happens to be the stepson of head coach Mack Brown — appeared to touch a live ball as he was standing on the edge of the playing field. You can read all the details in this thorough article from the Dallas Morning News:

Texas coach’s stepson steps in way

Even if you’re not going to read the article, give that link a click so you can look at the accompanying photo, which shows not just Chris Jessie, but several other Longhorn players and coaches, standing on the field of play.

Inexcusable.

This isn’t about the Longhorns per se — heck, they scored 52 points and beat Arizona State soundly, so why would I complain? — but about the little, simple, avoidable breakdowns in discipline that infect even good organizations, whether in sports, education, business, or what-have-you.

This isn’t a rant because the miscue gave the Sun Devils another play . . . which they turned into a touchdown. The real damage came in doing anything that would give the opponent an extra chance; it would have been a bad mistake even if the extra play led to a sack or a fumble for the Sun Devils.

And by the way, the blame doesn’t (just) fall onto Jessie. He was reacting to a ball that bounced right at his feet. Yes, he should have waiting until the whistle blew to indicate that the ball was dead . . . but it would have been a moot point if the ball had landed at his feet on the out-of-bounds side of the sideline. The blame falls squarely to Mack Brown, who is ultimately responsible for the conduct of his players and coaches on the sidelines. And it wasn’t like it was an unknown issue: the Longhorns had already been warned earlier in the game for leaking over the sideline onto the field.

It’s an inexcusable mistake, truly a dumb mistake, to create a situation that’s so preventable, yet that can so easily give an advantage to the opponent.

How hard would it be to prevent? Easy as pie. Imagine Mack Brown saying this in the locker room in the week before the first game of the season:

Men, one little thing I want us to pay attention to: if you’re on the field, you’re on the field. If you’re off it, you’re off it, not hanging over the sideline onto the field of play. It seems like a little thing, but I’ve seen teams get whistled for it, and it’s too easy to be standing there and have the ball find you — or for a tackler to find you before you can get out of the way. We’ll stay safer and avoid penalties by staying well back of the sidelines.

By the way, to let you know I’m serious: From time to time I’m going to be looking up and down the sideline. Any player I catch hanging over it is going to run until I get tired of watching him run. Any staff member I catch is going to be fined $100, to go into the general scholarship fund. So don’t let me catch you.

Not exactly rocket science. And if Brown’s many years of coaching hadn’t prepared him for this issue, he could have brought it up after the first time he noticed it during a game — which would have been somewhat before the Holiday Bowl ever rolled around.

The business payoff: the best organizations avoid the truly dumb preventable stuff. They don’t leak money around the edges. They address little issues before they become big issues. In general, they eliminate the dumb stuff as soon as they find it so that they don’t have to worry about a dumb little thing tanking their chances at success.

You’d think this would be obvious, yet you can’t read the business news for a week without coming across a story of how new management at a company turned the place around with a focus on executing myriad little details better.

Knowing which details qualify — well, that’s part of good management. Lots of very good football coaches don’t care a bit about how their players wear their hair, or whether they shave, or what music they play in the weight room. But they care a lot about the things that translate directly into success on the field. It’s the same for good business manager, whether the issue is turning in reports on time, or being truly thorough with employee evaluations, or starting meetings on time.

Little bits of discipline, applied routinely, add up to much bigger success.