Somehow, and I am still not particularly delighted about it, my 11-year-old son is a Chelsea supporter. This is a difficult thing for any parent to accept, but when he came out – provocatively and flamboyantly – I had to bury my prejudice and embrace diversity.
In the modern world, although it doesn’t feel right, if you were born in 2002 who else would you support? Success breeds success and the first highly successful Mourinho sojourn at Stamford Bridge has spawned a new generation of Blues.
As a result, the family has an outsized interest in how Chelsea does each weekend. This weekend they beat Southampton. This is interesting to any football fan because Southampton have been beating many, so-called superior, teams this year playing a form of football which is changing the terms of engagement.
Southampton have changed the game and its players are pressing and defending from the opposition’s penalty area, harassing full-backs and centre-halves. Typically defenders have a bit of time on the ball if the opposition stands off. Southampton are not giving the opposition defenders that luxury and are instead pressing them far up the pitch. This is not unlike what Jack Charlton did years ago.
Southampton and Charlton’s Ireland are great examples of fighting the battle on your terms, not on the terms the opposition set for you. If you allow the opposing team to dictate the terrain, the timing and the style of the battle, you are going to be on a hiding to nothing, particularly if the opposition are aristocrats and you are journeymen.
Southampton’s Argentinean coach Mauricio Pochettino (incidentally from a town called “Murphy” in the middle of the Pampas after John Murphy who emigrated in 1844 from Kilrane, Co Wexford) figured out that he couldn’t beat the big lads at their own game. Instead, he is playing football which suits his team rather than others. Southampton, despite their loss to Chelsea, are above Man Utd and Tottenham in the table.
We see this again and again in sport where a team changes the rules of the game, entirely legally, and influences the result simply by not doing what was expected of them.
Do you remember Pat Spillane’s outburst against what he termed “puke football” – referring to the Tyrone tactic of swarm defence? What upset the Kerry aristocrats was the fact that Tyrone identified that Kerry’s very strength, their effortless skill, was actually their major weakness and if Tyrone disrupted them and didn’t let them play, Kerry wouldn’t have any Plan B – or at least wouldn’t be able to put the plan together in the cauldron of the match. It might not have been for the purists and it wasn’t pretty but it was effective, very effective.
The tactic deployed by both Tyrone and Southampton is designed to disrupt the opposition, and capitalising on this very disruption is what generates results.
This is the essence of small business too. When we are faced with a large incumbent that appears unbeatable given our limited resources, the way to turn the tables is to disrupt, to upset and to fight on terrain that you identify rather than terrain that is identified for you.
Small businesses need to figure out how to change the rules, bend them, examining and targeting their opposition’s weakness.
Sometimes the small guy is positively affected by what is termed disruptive technology. This is a technology which comes on-stream and changes the game. The internet and social media are one such technology. This is because they change the way in which we engage, the way we behave. These types of technologies also lower the cost of entering business, allowing small companies to move faster and more determinedly into territory that was originally the preserve of giants.
Every generation has their disruptive technologies. In our grandparents’ day, things like the radio and the car destroyed pre-existing industries. The arrival of electricity did for other forms of energy and now of course social media is threatening the status quo from the media to retailing.
All businesses have three major ingredients. The first is vision. Without the vision, there is no objective to achieve. Without vision, you might as well take a wage and let someone else have the vision. The vision is normally benchmarked against the competition and is often pushed by the simple urge that you could do that better than the other guy.
The second set of ingredients are the constraints – normally money, people and technology or some combination or derivative of all three. Do I have enough money to start up? Can I employ the right people? And is the technology a barrier to getting to the market or starting up the business in the first place?
The third ingredient is energy. Do I have the energy to take the hits, to get back up and to continue driving forward when everyone has given up?
Every business faces the same three major dilemmas. And given that we are in a competitive world, even if you are doing well the worst thing to do is misdiagnose your success as something permanent.
Some businesses, when they are ahead, begin to believe that they have some sort of competitive advantage. This is dangerous. The most we have, no matter what we do, is a temporary monopoly, which will be figured out by the opposition. This is why constant innovation, movement and flexibility are essential to stay in the game.
There is nothing you do that can’t be copied and improved on by your competitors. But this is the essence of the system we live in. The recovery in Ireland will be driven by small companies that follow the Southampton model, taking on the big guys on the little guy’s own terms. The recovery won’t come from the large companies. It will come from small businesses feeling confident enough after a few big wins to employ an extra person or two.
But be warned, the big guys are not asleep. They too are watching, figuring out where your weakness is and reacting to you without you even knowing, until your advantage is gone.
Watching Chelsea playing Southampton the other day, the harsh realities of competition came back in spades. The wily Mourinho saw that if he played four across the front and the Southampton players stuck to the script of defending from the front, he’d drag them all around the park, leaving his front men unmarked. This is what happened. Back to the drawing board Southampton.
The sporting cycle, like the business cycle, starts all over again.
David McWilliams hosts the Winter Tales’ book festival at Dalkey on December 7. Tickets www.dalkeybookfestival.org
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Adam, subscribe, we on for New Model Army tomorrow?
What is going on with DMcW? Friedrich von Hayek, Jan. 27, 1981. His feudalist vision: “We shall not rebuild civilization on a large scale. . . . On the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and among the large ones there was more happiness in proportion to their avoidance of the deadly blight of centralization.” Now some may joke that the small people are leprechauns, but Hayek actually meant small numbers, much less than 7 billion today. Sound familiar? As for the “big guys”, cyclopes, well we know Odysseus… Read more »
We’re well versed in this hypothesis in West Cork. When we read about the 300 men at Thermopylae, 200 set to work here a while ago and got shot of an Empire that had set up camp for 800 years. The big issue for me, though there are many, many others, is that the Euro-crew don’t like our corporate tax rate. They should look at the waste and indulgence that is the EU circus first, is docha. Good man David. Keep it up. And at least your young lad doesn’t support West Ham, which is my particular affliction. BTW, going… Read more »
A sporting chap, DMcW, giving the banksters a new start. How liberal and generous he is with Ireland.
Great article…10/10.
Also, established players and big ones are also less willing to change and will fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo – guaranteeing their inevitable blowup…now if only the referee (Government) would only start recognising foul where it really happens.
The nation’s children will go on paying the cost of the bailout for some time
Fintan O’Toole’s piece on children in poverty includes the truly shocking fact that “…22 per cent of all Irish households were jobless”.
By 2011 61% of children were from families having difficulty making ends meet.
Classic opening paragraph. I spent nearly a decade on the waiting list for Arsenal tickets after my son came out of the closet, turned from blue to red, whilst I turned the living room air blue as he announced St Andrew’s was not his spiritual HQ. Highbury HQ rang me a while ago to say we are still on the Season Ticket waiting list: he left for Uni 2 months ago..sigh. BCFC are the real ‘blues’, so fcuk Chelski and their Moscow-on-Thames crap. Though Mourinho is the lulz-meister. Moving the goalposts in The Beautiful Game? Where do we start? Beckenabauer’s… Read more »
Yellow card for Bonbon, off-topic and off-side. Meanwhile, Enda claims hatrick after scoring against Holy See, Troika and negative ‘cribbers on sidelines who declined to suicide as Bertie instructed. FG 1 FF 0. LOL!
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Ireland-wins-top-spot-on-Forbes-Best-Countries-for-Business-list-234575611.html
This piece is “on the ball” – a quick start guide for all aspiring entrepreneurs. After two false starts and twenty five years of success, I can really appreciate its relevance to a start-up. While the vision thing is very important at the beginning, paranoia is more important by far, when up and going.
“But it would be wrong to say Ireland’s problems are over. The IMF predicts that its economy will grow by only about 2% a year until 2018—a feeble pace compared to rates of over 10% during the boom. According to Deutsche Bank, Ireland’s banks will need more public money if they are to comply with new international rules on capital. Returning them to health will weigh heavily on the rest of Ireland’s economy—and on its politics—for years to come.” http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21591231-most-irish-still-bank-their-governmentand-it-costing-them-concentrating “Small businesses need to figure out how to change the rules, bend them, examining and targeting their opposition’s weakness.” I… Read more »
Many lessons are learned from sport. It seems my playing style as a nine year old full back is now adopted by successful premier teams. I am usually 10-20 years ahead of my peers but 50 plus years is a record even for me. \ To learn the lesson of how to stop the depression one needs to read and study this assay. It is a question and answer series posited in February 2009 nearly 5 years ago. Antal Fekete appears to be years ahead of his peers. His credentials are easily researched. I have had this essay printed as… Read more »
Yawn, these sporting analogies bore the crap out of me. Cant even get past the first sentence so I don’t really know what the article is about.
Seth Godin has a blog that is dedicated to how small business can get the competitive advantage without inane boring stories about moronic behaviour by both children and adults. Two thumbs down for this crap article.
link
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
Trying to stand back from the financial roller coaster story and just looking at a business’s evolution in competitive marketplace, it often happens that fast development drives a lot of inefficiencies and waste as you try to meet demand. Systems and processes are not as clean as they should be because of intervening urgency. Costs mount all over the place and as long as revenue grows and the top line is good enough, no one cares about the hygiene aspects. One thing I am observing of late is that a lot of operations that have survived are now working vastly… Read more »
“He made us realise, we are our brother’s keeper and that our brothers come in all colours,” Ali said in a statement.
“He taught us forgiveness on a grand scale. His was a spirit born free, destined to soar above the rainbows. Today his spirit is soaring through the heavens. He is now forever free.”
Never mix business with pleasure
Never mix football with business, it has resulted money-ball
Never mix business media with social media, it results in a log off
Nelson Mandela,we salute you
“thank you for choosing to care”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otuwNwsqHmQ
http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Mercille-J-The-Media-the-Question-of-Sovereign-debt-default-in-the-European-Economic-Crisis-the-case-of-Ireland.pdf
“The role of the media in the current economic crisis has received little scholarly attention.
This paper examines news organisations’ coverage of the question of sovereign debt default, using the case of Ireland as an illustration.”
This is well worth the read.
Hey you gotta let the kid go his own way! I’m a scouser but I wouldn’t ram it down my nephew’s neck… (who is 4) Let him forge his own allegiance.
Something for “bitcoin”ers to be aware of
http://larouchepac.com/node/29054“>Faber: ‘We are in a massive speculative bubble’
…On Nov. 29, Black Friday, Marc Faber, editor and publisher of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, told CNBC he believes a “massive speculative bubble” has encroached on everything from stocks and bonds to bitcoin and farmland. He attributed the vast bubble to “symptoms of excess liquidity.”…
The murderous austerity imposed by a financial oligarchy no longer capable of guaranteeing its own future, intent on disintegrating mankind itself, is far worse than apartheid. So do not be deceived by words!
I sense the salivating over money the eyes opening widder the scent is over powering logic and reson as it did before. It is being demonstrated on here.. bits of money how much for this how many bits to be made with bits of nothing from nowhere. Look at yourself you are the elite the greedy….
I sense the salivating over money the eyes opening widder the scent is over powering logic and reson as it did before. It is being demonstrated on here.. bits of money how much for this how many bits to be made with bits of nothing from nowhere. Look at yourself you are the elite the greedy….
A contrast to the paranoid, law of the jungle world of football economics is well put in a retort on the IT.
How is life, liberty and pursuit of happiness possible in a paranoid, hyper competitive austerity-wracked world? Is DMcW selling Brutish “rights”?
A contrast to “small is beautiful” football economics :
The way was cleared by British energy secretary Ed Davey last month for the station at Hinkley Point in Somerset – a £14 billion project to be built by French energy company EDF, backed by Chinese money and capable of powering five million homes . An Taisce did not have gov’t support, but that is likely pure cowardice, not principle.
Looks like the wind is blowing the other way for greenie hot air.
Meanwhile back in the real world
FAMILIES are facing a crippling double blow of an ESB strike next week and the shutdown of about 500 schools weeks after Christmas.
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/schools-shut-lights-to-go-out-as-unions-dig-in-29817800.html
The nation’s children will go on paying the cost of the bailout for some time.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/the-nation-s-children-will-go-on-paying-the-cost-of-the-bailout-for-some-time-1.1614517
Meanwhile back in the real world FAMILIES are facing a crippling double blow of an ESB strike next week and the shutdown of about 500 schools weeks after Christmas: http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/schools-shut-lights-to-go-out-as-unions-dig-in-29817800.html The nation’s children will go on paying the cost of the bailout for some time: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/the-nation-s-children-will-go-on-paying-the-cost-of-the-bailout-for-some-time-1.1614517 ——————————- David. This site is throwing database connection errors and the same thing happened last Saturday. If you fix this problem then it might help people take you more seriously when you talk about technology. Or maybe it’s time to admit you might have made an implemntation error and rebuilt it all from scratch… Read more »
I didn’t know the first post had been accepted because all I got was a ‘database connection error’ message. Naturally I assumed my post was not accepted and I went back and edited my post further while waiting for your site to get it’s act together I went back to my post and added my critique of your database connection issue and tried again. It posted. Only problem is a duplicate post makes me feel kinda stupid and yet it’s not my problem. It is annoying. More annoying than Chelski You have had countless free advice over the years about… Read more »
Back to the article. Is there something wrong with the idea of companies needing to find new ways of dealing in the market place? My ans is – not really – assuming the base infrastructure remains unaltered. But that is not to be assumed lightly. The ESB strike, should it happen, should not be looked at solely from the point of view of industrial relations. If it happens we will be getting a taste of what happens when a real crisis hits – not some namby pamby financial pooh we keep on hearing for last few years. We are still… Read more »
Will people PLEASE stop using the words ‘MONEY’ and ‘INTRINSIC VALUE’ in the same sentence. Better still, just read a book on the History of Money. I mean honestly you can do better. Viable moneys down through the ages are backed by nothing more than sound mathematics, that’s it, period, look beyond the gold standard, the whale tooth standard, the shell bead standard, the leather hide standard, the Tally stick standard, they are all merely physical manifestations of the underlying structure of sound mathematics in play. Moneys fail when the their underlying mathematics no longer equate. Secondly, I would expect… Read more »
On e subject of money , whatamess, I’ll pull this comment from the last thread to this one. whatamess December 7, 2013 at 7:09 pm Tony, Why the knee jerk reaction to the mention of debt or credit money?Debt is a sine qua non of expansion?without credit,growth would be snail speed? As this is more your forte,can i ask Tony,is there enough gold to support an expanding economy and population or will it naturally result in deflation??If the answer is there is insufficient gold, we will then be SUPER reliant on gold production,to keep pace with expansion,especially if there was… Read more »
China knows how to play money football. China knows where the dollar is at. China doesn’t want anymore dollars it doesn’t want all its eggs in basket case. They may well along with other want to see the demise of it but they would want on there terms otherwise they might lose too . The problem with money is that its like a football, a ball is round and is hard to work out where it will bounce next. China buying and selling oil and other commodities in yuen and doing bartering business with others including Russia.hence the pivot to… Read more »
We see that a favorite pastime of goldbugs is tending the spuds and carrots in the balcony farm – small is beautiful, you see.
Tending that Utopian farm, pondering on the fertility of the soil, remember, goldbugs, that von Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society is a cornerstone founder of Pan Europe, today called the Eurozone.
The Legacy of Friedrich von Hayek: Fascism Didn’t Die With Hitler.
To counter the disruptive metalization of minds : List vs. von Hayek: Free-Trade Monetarism Is the Road to Serfdom von Hayek, the icon of goldbugs, is decisively dealt with. A Matter of Principle : Alexander Hamilton’s Economics : Hamilton’s Concept of Economic Value : Hamilton rejects the worldview that wealth is measurable in land, or precious metals (including specie), or even power over other nations. Rather, the wealth of the nation is dependent upon the physical economic development of the nation, including, most emphatically, the intellectual capabilities of its population for carrying out that development, more and more efficiently. …… Read more »
Intrinsic: belonging to or part of the real nature of something/somebody. My Kidney has an intrinsic value to me but I suspect those with kidney failure may see my Kidney as a intrinsic value to them.
money currency; something that is used or accepted by a lot of people, current money in Ireland is noted an the euro only because the people agree or accept it is.
Can there be a definition for connoted!!!!!!!? some people just don’t get this…
I thought this were an Intelligent Site What a mistake a 5 year old child would not write the Tripe that Is written Here . The Immaturity Shown Is Typical Of The Voters Here !,
This was beautiful Admin. Thank you for your reflections.
I do not even understand how I ended up here, but I assumed this publish used to be great