THERE'S A TRADITION IN TOURNAMENT PLAY
Which naturally brings us to March Madness🤔. March Madness is a nice bridge between the Super Bowl in February and the NBA Playoffs in April. (Probably lost a lot of subscribers by just writing that sentence.) I'm rooting for Kansas for the Men and Iowa for the Women this year. I love basketball and wrote about triangle offense as it relates to leadership here.
But this March, I'm thinking about one of my all-time favorite basketball movies, Hoosiers. This movie really tugs at my heartstrings; I can probably recite it from start to finish at this point in my life. Maybe it's the corn-laden midwestern setting, the beloved drunk played by Dennis Hopper that could have been based on my own father, who also played in the 60s version of March Madness, or just the fact that the boys in the film were so cute🥰. Hoosiers to March Madness isn't a 1:1 comparison because it's based on High School basketball and not college. But the intensity and the storyline are still the same. It's a David and Goliath story with the Hickory Huskers making an impossible ascent to the Indiana state championship in 1952. It is loosely based on the Milan basketball team that won the championship in 1954.
Coach Norman Dale isn't liked when he arrives and has a questionable past. He structures practices that aren't popular with some of the team or the local townspeople. But it's towards the end of the movie, when the team arrives for the Regional Finals, that Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) delivers one of the best speeches of the movie. At the core of the speech, he says,
"Forget about the crowds, the size of the school, their fancy uniforms, and remember what got you here. Focus on the fundamentals that we've gone over time and time again."
I think about that phrase often in business—focus on the fundamentals. Go over them time and time again. After 10 years of this and seeing all the latest and greatest fads in business growth come and go, I'm more convinced than ever that it's just about the fundaments. That era of magical thinking has gone poof.
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