Late last year I was talking with a client of mine, Justin Stark, Managing Director at Accenture. Justin said that the phrase that was circling around his organisation was, ‘Brilliant Basics’.

That is, there was a focus on people in the organisation doing the basics of business, extraordinarily well.

Doing the basics extraordinarily well is a message I share ad nauseam with my clients. I do this, because many of the my techniques seem on the surface, to be too basic to be effective. Their power is in their execution, particularly when the pressure is on. And if you do the basics very well, in how you present yourself and communicate your ideas,

you’ll separate yourself from a ‘sea of talking heads’.

And as you know there are a lot of talking heads around. They make a lot of noise but you don’t remember what they’ve said a day later, or a week later or a month later.

Here are other quotations around the brilliant basics theme:

• “When the pressure is at its highest, champions don’t necessarily raise their game they just deliver brilliant basics” Gilbert Enoka, Mental skills coach of the All Blacks (from the The Art of Winning by Dan Carter.
•  All the special forces personnel were doing, were the fundamentals, with precision, at high speed and under any condition.” Phil Kornachuk, former United States Army Ranger, as relayed on the podcast Finding Mastery.

Own the Conversation

Implementation idea:

• Over the next seven days choose one pressured meeting, situation etc and aim to do a ‘basic’ skill et al – brilliantly.