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April 11, 2005

Should we change our swing?

I'm not a huge golf fan, but this story about Tiger Woods winning his first major tournament in years contained a great nugget about change: Tiger takes Masters title for his ailing father.

An excerpt from the story:

Woods went 18 months without a stroke-play victory on the US PGA Tour while making adjustments to his swing with coach Hank Haney.

Woods took great criticism for the changes but said they were necessary if he was to become better than anyone, including superior to the form he showed to dominate golf in 2000 and 2001, capturing four majors in a row.

'I don't want to get back to 2000. I want to become better than that. That's the whole idea of making a change,' Woods said before the tournament. 'I won the Masters by 12 [strokes] in '97. I changed my game. Do I want to go back to that? No, I don't. I want to become better than that. I was able to achieve that and that's why I made this change. I'm starting to see the fruits of it.'

Right now, my association is like the Tiger Woods of 1997. We're going to end this fiscal year with a surplus of 10% of our total annual budget. Our membership is up 5% over last year. Our conferences are selling out. We're making more non-dues revenue than ever. We're cutting expenses by using technology, gaining efficiencies and capitalizing on economies of scale.

But as we plan for next year, I get the sense that much of our planning is centered around continuing last year's success. They say doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a sign of insanity. But could you also be considered insane by changing things that are obviously working?

Changing things up can cost you: After holding onto it for years, Tiger Woods recently lost his #1 ranking on the PGA Tour to Vijay Singh. Jim Collins writes that successful companies are defined by disciplined people, who engage in disciplined thought, and who take disciplined action.
How much energy should we devote to maintaining our current success? Or should we be devoting our energies to changing our swing? How often should we change, and how much? What is the proper balance between discipline and change?

1 comment:

Ben Martin, CAE said...

Hey, Jeff, thanks for the correction. Another hastily-written blog post ;-)