How to define winning when your business has no scoreboard

In sport, winning is unambiguous. There is a scoreboard, you sing the song, you get a medal. It happens over two hours, or a week, or a season, and everyone in the building agrees on what happened.

Nick Maxwell spent twenty years inside that. Then he went and built a business, and the clarity disappeared.

The six-year problem

He uses property development as the example. You buy a site. You spend two or three years in planning. You spend another two or three building. Six years later you sell it and move to the next one.

So how did you keep everyone motivated for six years? In sport you can stand in a huddle and say, right, let's win this quarter. You can break a season into pieces small enough that people feel something. Most businesses never name what winning looks like this week, so the only marker anyone has is a KPI at the end of the month or the end of the year.

Chase one per cent, not twenty

Nick's answer comes from Craig Bellamy and Frank Ponissi, the coach and general manager who have run the Melbourne Storm for two decades. At the end of every season the pair would spend three weeks visiting other clubs in other sports, watching and asking questions, looking for one per cent.

Bellamy would ring Nick on a Friday night about a player in a game he was watching, wanting to know why he had done a particular thing.

Business tends to hunt for twenty per cent. The trouble with a twenty per cent target is what happens at five: you got better and it still reads as failure. Aim for one and land two, and the same result feels like momentum.

The pebble, not the mountain

Nick reaches for the line about the pebble in your shoe being what wears you down, rather than the mountain ahead. The climb is not what throws you off course. The small persistent thing is.

So clear the small distractions, and let people see the next step.

Why one per cent compounds

The part that makes this more than a slogan is who is doing the improving. Nick's view as a captain was that if he could make the twenty-one players around him one per cent better, that added up to more than him getting fifty per cent better on his own.

When Bellamy and Ponissi live it, the people around them do it too - which means the one per cent stops having to come from the top.

The practical question for a team is the small one: how do you show that you won today, or won that meeting, or won that week.