Council Post: Putting The F.U.N. Back Into Business Fundamentals

By Andrew McConnell, co-founder and CEO of Rented

With my 4-year-old daughter’s preschool closed during the Covid-19 pandemic, I have been presented with an opportunity I would not otherwise have had. The extra hours of child care have certainly made it more difficult to run my business, but it has also given me the chance to spend more time with her.

We have not let that time go to waste. From teaching her side breathing with her swimming, to riding a bike without training wheels, to reading books of increasing difficulty, to writing thank-you cards and notes to family and loved ones, witnessing the rapidity of her progress has been eye-opening.

The process has also forced me to erase years (decades) of mindlessly doing each of these activities in order to wind back the clock and remember the fundamentals of each task in order to teach her the same. As I do, I continue to see just how much opportunity I have for self-improvement in each of the areas I am supposedly teaching her. For example, trying to decipher my handwritten notes for this article highlights one area in which revisiting the fundamentals could work wonders for me. Surely at this age and stage of my life, I should be well beyond the fundamentals, though, right? Wrong.

In his book, Raise Your Game: High Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best, performance coach Alan Stein Jr. describes his experience observing Kobe Bryant’s morning routine before practice. Not only did Kobe get to the gym hours before anyone else (and before the sun was up); he also spent that extra time practicing the most basic drills in basketball. The author was stunned. The best basketball player in the world was doing drills many high school players would think below them. What was going on? The answer, of course, was that Kobe was the best player because he so consistently invested time working on the fundamentals.

Basketball fans reading this will no doubt now be recalling the stories of legendary basketball coach John Wooden and his first-day-of-practice routine. For those who don’t know, John Wooden was the most successful college basketball coach of all time, winning a record 10 national championships over a 12-year span at UCLA, including a record seven in a row. Wooden coached some of the best players of the time, including Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Bill Walton. Yet, on the first day of practice, rather than taking the players out to the court to get to work on their game Wooden would have every single person take off their shoes and socks and would proceed to teach them the proper way to put on their socks (no wrinkles or gaps), as well as how to lace and tie their shoes to protect their feet. This likely seems too basic for players of that caliber, yet it was in consistently getting these basics right that Wooden and UCLA were able to build an unmatched dynasty.

This concept is not limited to basketball, or even to sports, for that matter. A friend of mine who is a mathematics professor at a top university shared with me a story of a time he sat in on a colleague’s class in the music department. A world-renowned pianist was visiting, and my friend was curious to learn how someone of that caliber thought about the discipline.

As part of the class, each student was given the opportunity to play a short piece and receive feedback from the visiting pianist. Each time, the pianist listened intently and offered the same recommendation: “Practice your scales.” After this feedback was offered for the fifth time in a row, my friend built up the courage to ask the visitor if this was just boilerplate feedback, or if there was something more substantive he was offering to the students.

Rather than reply, the visiting pianist went to the piano and proceeded to play the scales. My friend said it sounded like a virtuoso performance that far outshined any of the pieces the students had been playing. As he finished the visitor turned to my friend and said: “If they are not capable of achieving and maintaining excellence on this, how can they ever do so for something far more complex?”

This is all well and good for sports and the arts, but what about in business? What lessons can we learn from the giants of these other fields that are applicable to our own? The answer is to put the F.U.N. back into the fundamentals.

F: Find the fundamentals.

First, find the fundamentals for your respective area. For example, what do your customers really value about your product and service? Make sure you unequivocally know what this is and that you do not get blinded or distracted by new features or shiny bells and whistles at the expense of this core. Everything you do and everything you put out must deliver at least as well on that core value, and ideally even more so, over time.

U: Update your calendar.

Next, update how you spend your day-to-day to ensure you are spending adequate time focused on these fundamentals every single day. It will not be enough to occasionally think about them and work on them when you have the time. They are the time. They are the base of your day and the rest of your tasks should fill around them.

N: Never stop.

Finally, never stop practicing the fundamentals. It is easy to get complacent after a certain level of proficiency or success. Easy is rarely the right thing. If Kobe found value in waking up at 4 a.m. to practice the fundamentals of his craft every day, surely you and your business could benefit from the same dedication and focus.