Manage like basketball coach

If you ever watch the last 10 to 15 seconds on crucial basketball games, you would always see coaches making last second changes to their plans to win the game. Most of the time, the last seconds changes in the plan cause the team to win the game.

Last week, I had, with my team, to do round of presentations in front of panel of judges. Our project was a class project I was taking for the last 9 months. There were total of 12 teams. It was a two days event where we had to do a series of presentations and at each stage few times would be eliminated.

My team consisted of 3 members, 2 of them were doing the presentations and one (myself) was setting in the back watching their performance. I told my team members to think of this as a basketball game, I would watch them perform and as soon as they finish, we would discuss the weak parts and change our plan and re-think our approach for the next round.

This approach worked real well for us, and our team made it to the final round.

The lesson: as you manage, you may have to change your plans consistently, if an approach doesn’t work, don’t scrap the project, but re-think your strategy and change your approach, you will be surprised by how many new ideas will hit your mind as you move on.