Lead For Long Term Success

Hall of Fame football coach Bill Parcells says when he is teaching, he practices “NATO”: Not Attached To Outcome.

Here’s what he means. Say a player has the ball and he works to evade tacklers which is counter to how he has been coached. Through his superior talent and a bit of good luck he makes it to the end zone. In fact, the play is so thrilling it makes all the highlights shows.

Parcells says the player has a hard coaching session coming ahead. “In our system, you don’t run backwards and you don’t dance around when you have the ball. We go straight ahead.”

Parcells says that while occasionally a big play can result from moving about, more times than not, the team gets hurt with lost yards and fumbles. So, touchdown or not, the player is evaluated based upon his execution of his training.

That applies to us.

You can operate unsafely and get better short term production. But, in the long term, someone gets hurt.

You can avoid fixing your equipment correctly to save short term maintenance cost. But, the ultimate expense and downtime will be greater.

You get the point. Shortcuts and bad technique for the sake of short term results won’t work. Don’t get attached to them.