catches win matches

If you follow cricket you’ll likely know the phrase ‘catches win matches’.

In cricket, it is literally true. It’s also figuratively true everywhere else.

When you think about cricket and famous cricketers you think about the big name batsmen and bowlers. You think about Tendulkar with the bat and Warne with the ball.

What the phrase ‘catches win matches’ is getting at is that beyond the glitz and glamour of beautiful batting strokes and bamboozling deliveries there is a less celebrated but no less important supporting role of an entire field of players successfully catching balls flying their way.

Matches are often decided, not by some legendary individual effort but, by a steady and consistent effort of the whole team doing smaller actions, like catching a ball, consistently well.

No matter how good an individual is in cricket, a single player cannot compensate for a bad team who make repeated sloppy mistakes.

This is absolutely true in business too and in life in general. Your lesser appreciated boring but consistent actions are more important than your occasional impressive flourishes.

This can sometimes be hard to see.

If you’ve watched the movie or read the book ‘Moneyball’, you’ll know that a data analyst played a huge role in helping a perpetual underdog baseball team come from nowhere to break world records. They did this by recruiting a fresh team of misfits who had been overlooked by the major teams because of their apparent lack of star quality.

There are two big lessons you can take away from Moneyball. The first lesson is one of empiricism over emotion. The second more important lesson that one of the biggest mistakes you can make is overlooking the power of small consistent actions over lofty singular achievements.

In the world of business this might be overstating the power of a glitzy advertising campaign, and undervaluing the daily efforts of your front-line customer services teams.

It’s easy to dial out things that you see every day, and take for granted the status quo.

But you shouldn’t.

So keep the phrase ‘catches win matches’ front of mind whenever you’re thinking about your business priorities.