About a year ago, I was looking for a show to watch and the algorithms suggested The Blacklist. It’s a show about a white collar crime empire led by fugitive Raymond Reddington (played by James Spader, who is brilliant). Over the course of the 10 seasons of the show, Reddington becomes an FBI informant, delivering over high profile criminals while simultaneously doing so for his own interests. As the show is moving towards its conclusion, Reddington starts delivering his own “business units.” One of them is called The Morgana Logistics Corporation. As he sends the FBI on a wild goose chase to dismantle his company, Reddington gathers all of his senior leaders together to celebrate their achievements. In a toast, he celebrates “a monumental effort accomplished, as all great things are, with singular vision and collective action.”
His speech underscores the importance of discerning clearly defined strategy. It reinforces the idea that there cannot be more than one. It must be singular. It also highlights that there is a difference between strategy and execution. Having great ideas on a piece of paper is not enough. Your activities must align with your strategy, each complimenting the other and serving as building blocks towards the realization of that singular vision. This not only creates results, but it creates them faster than we may imagine. Since starting my coaching practice, I’ve noticed a common theme of clients setting three year goals that become a reality in one year. Why? It’s not because the goals were too low, but because of how much can be accomplished with “singular vision and collective action.” Things move freely, faster than expected, and stimulate our own imagination for what is possible.
Take, for example, Jesse Cole. He is the owner of Savannah Bananas and the creator of Banana Ball. His story is remarkable. Our family had the opportunity to be in attendance for one of the two sold out games at Fenway Park over the Fourth of July weekend. As someone who has promoted my own events in the past, I was in awe of what Jesse created. His focus is entirely on the fan experience. He has destroyed all of the bureaucratic elements of baseball that cause fans frustration and he has created a two-hour ball game that is fast-paced, fan-friendly, and largely irreverent for baseball traditionalists. He has had offers from investors to sell. He always declines. He refuses to charge processing fees or taxes on tickets. He even allowed us to bring bottled water into the stadium because of how hot it was going to be. His answer for everything he does, “Fans first.” That’s it. He doesn’t care about shiny objects, what anyone else is doing, or anything – for that matter – that is not fans first. At the beginning, he encountered a lot of resistance. Now he sells out stadiums that the people that own those stadiums can’t even sell out. It is all happening with his singular vision and a team who is completely sold out for what he stands for.
At the end of July, I made my annual visit to Villanova University to teach at the US Chamber’s Institute for Organization Management. It’s one of my favorite weeks of the year where I have the privilege of serving on the faculty for growth-minded Chamber and Association leaders from across the world. During my trip there, I was flying on a plane that didn’t have Wi-Fi or entertainment so I decided to download an episode of Ted Lasso, the AppleTV series that gave us all the feels as we were all healing from COVID. I forgot how much I loved the show, despite having watched it twice. One of my favorite characters is Coach Beard who is brilliant, eccentric, funny, and at the end of the show, incredibly human. Towards the end of the show he is really struggling with Ted bringing back Nathan Shelley, the team’s former equipment manager who left AFC Richmond to go coach their biggest rival. Not only did he leave the team, however, but he also made a fool of Ted on his way out. Ted was willing to forgive Nathan and bring him back, but Beard wasn’t ready. Until he was. In this extraordinary scene, Beard goes to Shelley’s house. Shelley greets him by asking, “Are you here to kill me?” Beard goes on to share his personal history with Ted which included Ted being the only one there for him after he was paroled. He shares why he has been so protective of Ted and why Nathan’s betrayal really hit a sensitive spot with him. At the end of the scene, he invites him to come back to work. Shelley asks Beard, “Are you going to head butt me now?”—which was his custom. Beard turns his hat around, grabs Nate by the face, and very gently brings their foreheads together. He then firmly embraces him.
Why am I sharing this story when everything else I’ve talked about has been about singular vision and collective action? Because this was at the heart of Ted’s vision for the team. He didn’t care about how many games they won or lost because he was more interested in developing the players to be the best versions of themselves. He cared equally (if not more) about the quality of their character as he did about their playing abilities. He rightly focused here because he knew if he could help to develop the players into their healthiest selves that the wins and losses would take care of themselves—and he was right. You see, this story about Beard and Shelley is one of countless examples in which Ted stuck to his principles and—while it may have been a longer term play—focused on developing his people. It was his vision, and all of the actions that his staff took were in support of that, including this beautiful moment of reconciliation.
Friends, we live in a time and place where we have more information at our fingertips than we ever have before. We are the most informed society that the world has ever seen. The sobering fact remains that it’s making us more anxious, more uncertain, more confused, and more distracted than we have ever been. In a world flooded by too much information, singular vision and action directed to serving that singular vision is what produces the best results.