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MYTH: FOR BIG SUCCESS'S, RISK THE BIG PLAY

Let me make one thing clear right now: I don't believe in the big play. In fact, with very few exceptions I don't think there is any such thing as a planned big play.

Let's start with football. You hear the term "big play" all the time on television. "St. Louis needs a big play right here," intones my buddy Howard Cosell from time to time. What Howard means, of course, is that the Cardinals are in some kind of hole with the clock grinding down, and only the breakaway run or long bomb pass over everybody's head will save the game for them.

This is desperation football. This is the only situation in which "big play" truly applies. By definition, if you're playing desperation football, you're in trouble. It means that your team didn't do something else right earlier in the game. Being forced to go for the big play is almost the definition of failure. It is the last grasping for straws that will overcome all your previous deficiencies.

If winning by big plays is a team's conscious strategy, it is doomed to a losing season. The game is sixty minutes long, so each team has time to institute a sound game plan,
carry out long drives based on reasonable gains and win with solid football, not big plays. Big plays cannot be planned or forced; they just happen.

The big play is the football equivalent of the businessman who gambles the mortgage on the single venture - one product line, one high-stakes real estate deal, a single technological innovation - to catapult his company into high profitability. It may work occasionally, but as a rule this is the route to business failure. No less a business giant than shipping magnate D. K. Ludwig learned this lesson to his sorrow when he overreached on the development of huge tracts of the Brazilian jungle, a venture which he finally had to abandon.

A perfect example of a company that: develops a sound game plan and tries to make reasonable gains with a solid business repertoire is The 3M Company of Minneapolis.
Rather than throw all its eggs into the single basket of a big play, this multifarious Minnesota manufacturer keeps a highly varied product line on the market and is constantly renewing it with innovative products. This strategy has been called "nichemanship." It is based on the principle that at least 25 percent of the company's revenues should at all times be derived from new products.  With a new product defined as one less than five years old, this stimulates a constant, ongoing search in the marketing and research divisions for new ways to serve the consumer. This is a company that stretches rather than looks for salvation in the long ball.

I learned early, the hard way, that the big play is not only an unreliable approach to football but that it can have a negative effect on the rest of your game. In my second game as a rookie quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings, we were playing Dallas, themselves a lowly expansion team only the year before. I was still riding high from our opening-game upset victory over the Chicago Bears the week before, smug in the certainty of my invincibility in the National Football League. And sure enough, on our first series of downs, I reached back and threw a long "bomb" for a 70-yard touchdown.

I thought, "Heck. This is easy. Ill just do things like that all day."

We never scored again that day, and the Cowboys beat us like a drum, 21-7.

The big plays that do occur in football are, often as not, accidental. There is, I suppose, such a thing as a true big play, but even they emerge naturally from a series of other small things you have done right. Once, at fourth and 1 on the other team's 45-yard line, I called a quarterback sneak - and ran for a touchdown! That play is designed to gain exactly 1 yard - but it accidentally became a big play.

On the blackboard and in the playbook, every play is designed to be the big play. Every offensive play shows the ball carrier continuing like a straight arrow down the field. We have X's and O's; we have blocking symbols and dotted lines; but we have no symbol in the offensive playbooks for a tackle! We score every time!

Thank God, I learned early not to live by the big play alone. If you look back at my career statistics, you'll see that my longevity and record-setting in the game were based not on the spectacular big plays, but on steady execution of the proven ground gainers: short passes and consistent running plays. My old nemesis, the late Norm Van Brocklin, recognized early that I didn't have the arm for the 30-yard pass toward the sidelines (an "out ball"), and one day he told me so. "Tarkenton," he said, "you can't get ten pounds of manure into a one-pound bag." After that, I concentrated on the short balls across the middle and on quick-outs to the flats.

But not all quarterbacks are fortunate enough to learn this important lesson. Even one of my own teammates seemed to suffer from a love affair with the big play.  Bobby Lee, like all the backup quarterbacks I played with for eighteen years, had a stronger arm and better physical gifts than I. He was 6 feet, 2 inches tall and 200 pounds.  His frozen-rope passes made mine look like loose clothesline. But Bobby Lee never became a permanent starting quarterback who could lead a team to victory. Why? Because, with all his strength, he had fallen in love with the big play: the long ball that wins the game in glory and style. As a result, Bobby remained a journeyman quarterback all his career.

The same thing happens in business all the time. A company has a problem. It looks for a cure-all solution, a quick panacea that will drive the demons away overnight and bring success in the front door like a Heisman Trophy. As often as not, the result is early insolvency.

All of us have heard stories of the man who invented the better mousetrap and got rich quick. America is in love with its Horatio Alger legend. Even today, we hear these stories in the burgeoning computer field. I believe in risk-taking entrepreneurship, but these are the rare dream tales - the wonder boys who are in the right place at the right time. If football taught me anything about business, it is that you win the game one play at a time.

Your chances of success in business by the magic method are about as great as those of the ghetto lads who all think they are Magic Johnson or Tony Dorsett. Tennis champion Arthur Ashe constantly reminds them that there are only a few hundred full-time professional athletes making big money in America in any given year, and that banking on sports to pull them into the mainstream is like dealing with play money. He tells them to hone their skills in school for a successful life in other fields.  Likewise, the good businessman is constantly learning from others the details and solid plays that will make his company go. The big play is strictly fool's gold.

Maybe it was my lack of outstanding physical prowess that helped me so much in the game. I learned early that I could not live by my arm, my speed or my strength. I had to learn to live by my wits. I scrambled.

Scrambling is the opposite of the big play. It is like the street kid trying to figure out how to start a lemonade stand when he hears about a summertime parade five minutes after it has started. It is a readiness to adapt and turn what appears to be a losing situation to your advantage. Scrambling, truth to tell, is what most of us do all the time in our lives. Being a scrambler is a sure teacher that you cannot live by the big play.

Norm Van Brocklin taught me a corollary lesson.  Whenever he saw me trying to make too much out of a play, he said, "You'll never go broke taking a profit."

Van Brocklin was talking the language of the stock market on the football field. He was trying to teach me a simple lesson: don't go for 15 risky yards when you can get 5 sure ones. It is a principle of the marketplace that you will never fail if you take your gains modestly but consistently. The people who go broke and jump out of skyscraper windows are the ones who gambled on the big play and got burned - badly.

Big plays are just that - gambling. Gambling is for Las Vegas. Risk-taking is for business. The difference between the two is that the risk-taker knows both his downsides and his upsides. The gambler is praying for help from Lady Luck.

When in doubt, remember that in football an 80-yard drive is better than an 80-yard "bomb." The bomb - the long pass that scores a touchdown - can be dismissed by the other team as a lucky, one-time fluke, which it probably is. The sustained drive that systematically pushes the other team back over its own goal line shows them that you play sound, unbeatable football, and is far more demoralizing to your opposition.

The smart leader sets visible, reasonably attainable goals for his sports or business team and lets the greater victory take care of itself. Jimmy Robinson at American Express is known for outlining his company's long-term strategy but getting his people to focus on short-term targets. With some 45,000 products on the market, 3M is the classic example of a team that beats the world with an endless string of small, good plays - remember Scotch Tape! - rather than banking heavily on a single money cow.  "We're a nickels and-dimes company," laughs international operations president James A. Thwaits. "We don't have many big-ticket items." And yet 3M is a $6 billion company!

Winning the big games in business or sports with a series of steady, small victories is a surer route to success than gambling your mortgage on the big play. He who lives by the big play will die by it.

FACT: Beware the big play: The 80-yard drive is better than the 80-yard pass.

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