A Different Way in Hockey
Our LaserShip hockey fans should not feel slighted with today’s LaserDay about how the hockey team from Tampa—The Tampa Bay Lightening—are shaking up the game—and winning!
Hockey is a conservative sport—“this is how we do it, this is how it is done.” But, by turning this upside down—“this is how we will win against the competition”—Tampa has won four of their first five games and scored an impressive 17 goals in its four wins.
What are they doing differently? Tampa calls the changes they have made to the traditional form of play “the hurry-up offense.” The key ingredients are two changes: Faster skaters on the ice and a different approach to play. Tampa wants to dictate play and shoot the puck 40 times a game—twice the number of traditional play—while limiting opponents to the lesser number of 20 shots. Boiling it down, Tampa’s slogan is simple: “Shoot. The. Puck.”
The result is a fast-skating brand of hockey that often looks like an all-out blitz. In their first game, the Lightning raced to a 4-0 lead in 25 minutes. Monday of this week, against Dallas, which had been undefeated, the Lightning outshot the Stars 44-19.
"The main idea of it is just being aggressive,” says the team’s center, “five guys on the puck all the time, don't even let the other guys get a chance to set up. When you see it work you wonder, 'Why hasn't anyone done it before?' "
A Different Way at LaserShip
Sometimes, to win, it takes faster players and a change in tactics. Our DC office, for example, had to examine its performance when a key on-demand client left for a “faster, more reliable” competitor. To win back the law firm, keep others and gain additional clients, the office shifted personnel and responsibilities, added additional car and bike contractors, and shifted to a high communication approach. The approach has shown promise—getting the client who left to give LaserShip the “try” it needs to prove itself.
“Despite losing the client 3 months ago,” says Senior Shipping Consultant Chris Harney, “we kept in touch and made sure they knew they were missed by us a company and as friends. By demonstrating that we were willing to shake things up—not just play the same old game—they were persuaded to give our team a trial run.”
A Different Way in the Sciences
The great scientist Albert Einstein once said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them," Einstein's point was that anyone's knowledge and understanding is limited to his or her own experience, training and information sources. To solve problems that we ourselves have created all of us must first be open to new ideas and reach out for new perspectives. In the case of DC’s On-Demand team, this involved reaching out to see their people, processes and performance from a uniquely customer perspective. Thus DC is solving problems using a different kind of thinking than was used when they were created.
Einstein’s genius was his ability to break out of the traditional, conservative approaches that existed in math and physics: Thinking that while seemingly logically defined was a box that trapped the advancement of the sciences. Einstein was the first “out of the box” thinker; he used his imagination to "leap out of the box" to see what results would look like using various scenarios.
Winners Don’t Do Different Things, They Just Do Things Differently. Winners have a tendency to look for differing perspectives, to seek the bigger picture. If they are handling a project, they do not just look only at how things were done yesterday or what needs to be done by the day; while doing what needs to be done today they are also analyzing and planning how it could be done better tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment