Don't Die By Your Ideas

Super-coach, and some might say super-ego, Jose Mourinho, football's self-styled 'Special One', enjoys another bumper pay-off after his latest sacking. Add it to the fifty-mil. As he slips straight into one more hot seat, quotes abound highlighting his apparent ossification.

For once, he was at the vanguard. A one-man innovating machine.

“You have those coaches who try to do things that just don’t work. And because of that they die. They say: ‘I died, but I died by my ideas.’ My friend, if you died by your ideas, you are stupid.”

Yet now stands accused of being stubbornly wedded to his old ways. Unable to countenance new paths. It is he who falls due to being wedded to ideas now died.

Whatever the merits of his personal playbook progress, such coverage leans upon a huge misapprehension that we in selling must remould.

It is never 'survival of the fittest'. Those who thrive are actually the most adaptive to change; and those that apply what they learn.

As the wisdom exhorts, '... when the facts change'.

With its not insignificant fellow pincer of fast failure. Reborn in 2.0 style as #FailFast.

This particular instance reminded me of a classic interview question for Sales hires.

"When was the last time you tried something new?"

Probing for what happened then, how often such gets undertaken, and their undercurrent for iteration, creation and refinement.

Phrases like results-orientated pragmatism, realism over idealism, and substance over style often accompany assessment of the early (successful) Mourinho Way.

When transposed into the solution sell those that prevail embrace striving for the optimal process, without being rigidly stuck to a single source.