How Bungled Cricket Selection Can Help Your Bid

Appointment to a committee is most people’s idea of hell. Needless ceaseless ego driven compromise produces the apocryphal camel when a horse was the answer.

I couldn’t believe an example of such deadly groupthink tried hard to scupper England’s cricket chances this past fortnight.

Our best bowler wrongly rested, unready batsmen maintained and the obvious spinner left out. All at the hands at the bizarrerie of the misfiring selection panel. They may say the result eventually came good (levelling the series immediately). But they lost one first up in a thrashing. In this light, their’s is not a sustainable approach to success.

For readers perplexed by the great game, let me move straight to the sales insight. A former international berated this festering malaise. Following an anecdote from mistakenly drinking brandy in Durban that we all must recognise (both parties consumed that which they did not like wrongly thinking they were doing so to please the other’s taste), he commented;

There is enough evidence, based on social experiments, to show the more people involved in making a decision, the less likely they are to arrive at something definite as opposed to a consensus. There are always trade-offs or disagreements.

Tell us something we don’t know. In so-termed complex selling – where more than one person’s say-so is required for progress – we come across this every day.

As the old bowler later writes, “Putting on a united front is not the same as being accountable”. We must get inside this. Exploit where necessary.

“Today’s selection process is an anachronism…It needs to be streamlined.” I bet you can say that about many a ‘DMU’ you deal with.

We are trained to identify the decision making unit. The players within, their motivations and the roles each perform.

It is here we can pick up a most worthy tactic.

Imagine asking along the lines of “what are the trade-offs and disagreements?”