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How Difficult-to-Copy Strategies Produce Business, Rock Music, and — Now — College Football Success

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Strategies determine success or failure of businesses, rock bands, and Division 1 college football teams.

In business school, I’ll never forget the powerful educational impact of learning a case study about Southwest Airlines. Entering the market later than many industry leaders, this company’s strategy centered on flying to mid-range airports, using only one type of airplane, and hiring the most upbeat and positive people as employees. That was it. No more, no less.

These strategic plans differed from established leaders who flew to major airports, flew several different types of airplanes, and delivered mediocre or worst customer service.

The elegance and brilliance of the Southwest Airlines strategy was that it, from the start, decide what it would do and, importantly, what it would not do. And didn’t waver. The upstart airline decided not to compete with the larger airlines that flew often into larger airports. Discipline was the key. The result was one of the most successful airlines in history.

Similarly, rock star Bruce Springsteen, early on before he hit it big, focused on what to do and not do. He realized he didn’t have a great voice and found out his band wasn’t becoming popular playing in the San Francisco area where they played several times to gain recognition.

So he made a few key strategic decisions. Honest with himself that he was never going to have a great voice, yet still wanting to be a big-time rock band, he made up his mind his band would have to be more entertaining than any other band rather than depend on people coming out just to listen to him sing. Their shows would stand out for their amazing energy more than any other band.

And he started playing a lot more in and around his hometown in New Jersey where his band was more popular, and writing and performing songs about life in his hometown that resonated well with the local fans. His understanding of what it was like growing up in New Jersey and writing song lyrics capturing those stories was unique and tough to duplicate. He understood that life because he lived it.

Other musicians would have had a tough time writing powerful songs about a specific place unless they grew up there also. The strategic decisions he made and never deviated from made Springsteen’s band one of the most popular of all time.

There are intriguing stories about sports teams using strategies to achieve success. One of the most fascinating, timely, and head-turning is now on full display by the Wake Forest University football team. Like I’ve never seen before in sports, the team is demonstrating the power of an unusual, compelling, and effective strategy.

Historically a mediocre team at best, Wake Forest doesn’t attract the best high school players in the country to play for them. As such, they often compete against teams with superior athletic ability such as Clemson University, a national powerhouse every year. Knowing this, the coaches have decided to play football in a different way, using a unique offensive strategy, and this has resulted in the greatest multi-year era of successful football in the school’s history – by far.

The heart of the strategy is an offensive scheme called the delayed run-pass option mesh. In college football, in recent years the run-pass option often called “RPO” has become widely used. It’s a scheme in which the quarterback either fakes a handoff to the running back and passes or hands it off.

But Wake Forest has extended the delay time for the fake handoff at least one second longer than other teams. One second may sound like a minor change, but that extra time tucking the ball in the running back’s belly has proven to be a devastatingly difficult situation for defenses to react to and defend.

While delaying his decision whether to hand off or pass, the quarterback gains extra time to see whether the safety, linebacker, or cornerbacks are blitzing or staying back in pass coverage. The quarterback makes snap decisions about whether to hand off or hold the ball and pass or run himself based on what the defenders do. In effect, the delay enables the quarterback to figure out what the defense is doing more accurately so he can make better decisions about whether to hand off or pass the ball.

When more guys rush, he passes; when more cover the receivers, he hands the ball off. So every time they execute this strategy, they don’t know themselves in advance whether the play is a pass or run. The strategy unfolds depending on what the quarterback discerns. It’s like making real-time, spontaneous chess moves as you watch your opponent make his moves.

This whole scheme may sound simple and a lot like how offensive football has been played for decades. But it’s not that at all. And it may seem every team could use the same strategy, hold the ball an extra second. But it would be difficult to master it the way the Wake Forest quarterback has.

It’s an incredibly well-choreographed scheme, almost a set of intricate, on-to-spot new dance steps, where timing, decisions, and actions have to be blended with incredible efficiency to make it work. And Wake Forest knows how to execute this strategic dance number better than any team in college football now or ever.

I became fascinated with creating successful strategies in a master of business administration class several years ago. I learned that strategy is about making choices of what not to focus on, what not to, who not to serve, what plays not to run, and then pinpoint exactly who you will serve with what specific services or game plans. A strategy is a way to make yourself stand out in the marketplace, among bands, or on a football field for being different. But it’s not about just being different. The whole point is to deliver value and be effective in a way no one else is.

A strategy has three elements and without any one of the three, you don’t have a real strategy that can be effective. First, a strategy needs to be difficult to copy. Your competitors should not be able to just replicate your strategy easily and with minimal investment or research time. Your strategy must have elements that tie together in ways that can’t be easily connected together by anyone else.

The Wake Forest offense is not easy to copy. You have to have a quarterback who knows how to read the movements of several defensive players instantaneously and make the right decisions based on logical assessments. It’s hard to do; there aren’t that many quarterbacks who can process information so fast and, importantly, consistently make the correct split-second decisions and have the ability to throw the ball accurately, and, run fast enough to gain yards if he sees an open field.

The most intriguing part about the Wake Forest offense is there are other components to the strategy beyond what I’ve described that I believe only the offensive coordinator, head coach, quarterback, and offensive players understand. The coach has been asked for more details about how this scheme is so effective and he won’t go deeper.

They don’t want their strategy to be easy to copy, of course, so they withhold key concepts they alone have created and put to powerful use. Given how effective the scheme is, I believe they have applied some customized timing formulas, maybe some probability and statistics, and newfangled analytics into these decisions and offensive route-running. There could very well be some mathematical formulas or calculations that help them so frequently make the right decisions. Something like, if the safety steps forward when the ball is snapped, we should pass the ball 77 percent of the time and get a completion.

Think of this as a bit like Apple’s iPhone. The smartphone giant pulled off that one-button-does-everything strategy which makes it easy to use. We all like that ease of use so much so we revere the entire iPhone creation in nod our heads to its well-earned excellence and endless mystique. But there’s a whole lot about the iPhone we don’t know that Apple won’t reveal that makes the product valuable and special and something we’re willing to spend a lot of money for.

We don’t know, for instance, how the silicon chips are layed out on the internal circuit board. Apple iPhones are locked shut. The iPhone is a slam dunk-winning strategy all the way around – just like the Wake Forest offensive scheme.

 

Second, a strategy also needs to be easy to understand your employees, customers, band members, and players.

If your strategy is too complicated, if it can’t be explained in simple terms, too many people won’t resonate with it or understand it. They won’t be able to rally around and execute the strategy. Again, think of the iPhone. One button to do everything you need. Simple to understand.

For the Wake Forest offensive players, the offensive strategy is easy to understand. The coaches teach it to them and they run it extraordinarily well. At its core, it’s about holding the ball longer than any other team before deciding whether to pass or run. All the players on the team know this; it’s easy to grasp for them and anyone watching them play. So they can execute without having to overthink anything or get confused about what to do on each play.

Third, a strategy must be sustainable over the long term meaning several years. If your strategy can only be viable for a few weeks or months, it won’t deliver big enough financial returns or enough wins so won’t be worth executing. It’s a flawed strategy destined not to work. A strategy that can be used over five or more years will deliver the financial benefits or concert revenues or victories you’re after.

Wake Forest has been using this same delayed scheme for several years. It’s a long-term commitment to execute in a specific way, to master a different set of skills and tactics that other teams don’t use or haven’t been able to figure out how to in the unique way Wake Forest does this.

They recruit specific types of players to run this offense, a quick-thinking quarterback, intelligent and tall receivers with sure hands, and bruising running backs who are strong enough to block rushers from disrupting the quarterback. And going forward for the next several years they will still be using this scheme. It’s a sustainable, long-term strategy that will continue to be effective.

Strategy comes down to choices. Wake Forest has chosen to play offense in a highly innovative and specific way that differs from other teams. Defenses have to spend lots of time trying to figure out how to stop the offense and they don’t have a lot of experience defending it against other teams. That takes lots of research time and preparation.

All that causes them to over-prepare and over-think their defensive counter-strategy, making the game-time decision-making more analytical and less instinctive. Meanwhile, they’re not focused on other important tactics to get their team ready to win.

The most effective strategies require discipline, sticking to the plan no matter what regardless of what others are doing. If Wake Forest changed its offensive scheme from week to week, they wouldn’t be able to master the execution of the delayed run-pass option mesh. They would be less effective in executing several different schemes just like Southwest Airlines would have needed to spend a lot more money repairing several different types of planes instead of just one.

They use only one type so repair costs are minimized; the mechanics don’t have to go into their technical manuals to understand five different types of planes, increasing the time to repair and the likelihood of mistakes. Wake players don’t have to learn several different offenses. Repetitively, they simply fine-tune the one they know and understand which creates better execution and less time learning and confusion learning different offensive schemes.

Wake Forest football coaches and players have decided, like Southwest Airlines and Bruce Springsteen, to do certain things in a specific way and not deviate from the strategic plan. They’ve figured out they can out-think teams with their scheme without having to have the same level of athletes as their opponents.

The scheme neutralizes the athletic advantages of their opponents because it creates advantages for Wake Forest against defenses that struggle to figure out whether they’re going to run or pass – on virtually every single play. You can be a faster defender playing against Wake Forest but be slower to react to the run or pass play, thereby negating your advantage.

In studying the Southwest Airlines case, I remember learning about the concept of a strategy being like a house of cards. It all stands just fine if you have all the elements, the cards, stacked up the right way. But if you pull out any one of those cards, the strategy falls apart. If the Wake Forest offense decided to change one of the cards in this house it has built, the strategy wouldn’t work.

For instance, if they didn’t recruit a quarterback with the ability to process information quickly, the offense wouldn’t work. If they delayed handing the ball off for four seconds instead of one, the quarterback wouldn’t have time to read the defenses.

The strategy is airtight. All the pieces fit together and are interwoven and interdependent. It’s brilliant strategic thinking, a classic case study of figuring out how you can gain an upper hand over your competition, refining it, mastering it, and then winning bunches of football games against teams who have more talent.

All because you make choices about what not to do, master what you do, and stick to the plan.

Sammy Sportface

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Sammy Sportface

Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here: Sammy Sportface Has a Vision -- Check It Out Sammy Sportface -- The Baby Boomer Brotherhood Blog -- Facebook Page
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Sammy Sportface
Sammy Sportface
Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:

Sammy Sportface Has a Vision -- Check It Out

Sammy Sportface -- The Baby Boomer Brotherhood Blog -- Facebook Page

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