A good Game Plan is needed by anybody who wants to achieve a goal. The French writer, poet and aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry (1900 – 1944) once said "A goal without a plan is just a wish." In a podcast for the Orrick Law firm, Jack Clark, who has led the University of California's Rugby teams to 28 National Championships in 33 years, offered great insight as to how he approaches his Game Plans:
 
"Whatever we're going to decide it will be something we can execute on by way of our strengths. I'm always going to look through the lens of what is it that we do well, even if I thought that the opposition had a real hole in their game, and it was there to be exploited. If I didn't think that we had the competences in that area, that wouldn't become a central point in my game plan. I think game plans have to be decided on what you do best and then I think that the next pillar of that is what you can take away from the opposition."
 
If Clark was a basketball coach he would not play a zone defense unless his team was very good at a zone defense, irrespective of the opponent's incompetence against a zone defense. In terms of a Game Plan for a career, don't pursue a sales job irrespective of the potential revenue if you don't truly enjoy dealing with the public. Don't pursue an administrative office job if you thrive being out talking to people. The best salespeople don't always make the best sales managers and the best sales managers don't make the best salespeople.
 
Don't embark on a Game Plan, whether it's a sports or a business team, unless you have the right people to execute it. In the long run, you have to decide to recruit people that fit your Game Planor recruit the best people available and be willing to change your Game Plan to fit them.
 
Bill Marriot was once asked the secret to great customer service at the Marriot Hotels. He replied: We hire nice people. John Shields, the former CEO of Trader Joe's, once commented that when he interviewed somebody for retail, he wouldn't hire them if they didn't smile within 30 seconds. Coach Wooden commented "I consider quickness to be the most important physical asset for an athlete. Second to quickness, I wanted to know what kind of person he was: Was he a team player or could he be made into a team player?" These leaders' recruited people who could execute their Game Plan.
 
What Coach Clark did not do was take his team away from their strengths in an attempt to take advantage of an opponent's weakness. That would be like pursuing a career only for the money.
 
What's your Game Plan?

​Jack Clark who has led the University of California's Rugby teams to 28 National Championships in 33 years demands accountability from his players and is able to get his players to hold each other accountable by using a collaborative approach to decide what the team does well and what they need to improve on. On Sunday morning after a Saturday game, Coach Clark has a team meeting. In an interview with Jan Stenker for Unconditionally Strong, he described how the Team Meeting is conducted:
 
"We open every meeting with what we did well. We never cut that list short — we always build upon it. It's got to be real, though. It can't be stuff that is kind of halfway true. It's got to be real stuff. That collaboration is not just between players and staff — it's sometimes between player and player, where somebody's going to say, "I thought we tackled really well." And somebody else is going to say, "I don't know. I think our defensive structure was good but we fell off a lot of tackles." "I agree with you." "Hold on, we did well around the fringe but not on the corner of the defense." It's that level of detail. I'm going to facilitate that and I'm going to let it come out, so it's collaborative.
 
Then we're going to do the same thing about what we didn't do well, and what we have to build on. The coaches have stats and we're going to start presenting some information to them. But while it's fresh in their minds, we want to have the players make their lists first."
 
It is important to note that the Coaching Staff does not present the game statistics until after the players have collaborated to make their specific lists of what they did well and what they didn't do well. As Coach Wooden liked to say: "Listen if you want to be heard."
 
The Coaches and players then discuss detailed performance metrics and agree upon where they are progress-wise by pinpointing their performance level on a weekly graph. Clark described the discussions this way:
 
"Where are we, here? Are we here, are we here? Where are we?" There's a little bit of, "No, down. Okay. There. That's it." Then we can just play with that week to week. "Did we improve?" "Yeah, I think we got a little better." "Now, the opposition wasn't very good so let's not get carried away that we're all that. So maybe we're just here."
 
You can perform poorly against a weak opponent and win. You can make a poor sales presentation and get the sale from an eager buyer. Coach Clark does not let his teams get carried away with phony statistics.
 
The meeting is concluded with players and coaches all having collaborated and agreed on specifically what they need to improve and build on during the next week of practice. By starting the meeting with what the team is doing well Clark creates a positive learning environment where people are open and not defensive.This sets up the collaboration. Collaboration causes teams to be eager, not just willing to improve.
 

​Jack Clark has led the University of California's Rugby teams to 28 National Championships in 33 years with a simple mantra: "Team First, Self Last". In an interview with Jan Stenker for Unconditionally Strong Clark discussed his approach:
 
"We say team first, self last and we mean it. Sometimes one of the students will ask for a meeting because they want to talk about playing time or something. They'll sit down and they'll start asking the question and they'll be fumbling around with it. Finally they'll just say, "You're going to ask me what's best for the team, aren't you?" And I say, "Of course." That's the first lens that comes down on every decision we make. On a day-to-day operational basis, what are we doing, why we are doing it and who's doing it gets filtered through what's best for the team. The team likes that. There's merit in that. We process any piece of business that comes before the team right through that system."
 
Coach Clark asks his players to think about and use their experience to become experts in team. Clark and his players recognize that being a good teammate and being a good player are separate skill sets. Coach Wooden also felt both were essential and thus required.
 
"We celebrate team, talk about it and build on it. Growing up our players have all been on teams for 10 years. They've had good teams and bad teams and good teammates and bad teammates and everything in between. I want them to use all of that experience to recognize the differences, I want them to feel like they're an expert in Team. A value like selflessness, this idea that in making decisions, team comes first, self comes second — you get this done and it solves 10 problems. If your choice is that you just wait for individual drama, 65 guys all have something wrong." Try to process all that on a daily basis and you spend more time keeping everyone's nose pointed in the same direction than you do actually trying to improve as a team."
 
Clark feels that as a Coach he has the unique opportunity to make his players experts in Team; a skill that will help them well beyond graduation. He put it this way:
 
"How will world poverty be solved? How will education be solved? How will a devastating disease be solved? Is it going to be some brilliant dude or gal that says "I've got an idea here"? No, it's going to be groups of people pulling together in a team. I happen to believe that if you matriculate this program with a PhD in team that you're going to be really well prepared to go participate on one of these meaningful teams somewhere — maybe in your own family. Maybe it's in a business. I think it's a wonderful skill to have."
 
How do you teach your team members to be experts in Team?

​Jack Clark is the University of California's varsity rugby head coach. His teams have won 28 National Championships in 33 years compiling an overall record of 758–96–5 an .883 winning percentage. The amazing consistency of Coach Clark's teams is driven by an environment where the focus is on constant improvement that is judged on "Performance not Results". Clark put it this way: "We have a performance culture where the byproduct is winning, versus 'We're all about winning.' That's not really how we think." Whether it's a sports team or a business team Clark believes continual improvement requires a Daily Training Environment or DTE. In a podcast for the Orrick Law firm Clark put it this way:
 
"The high performance teams that I've seen have a really strong daily training environment, a DTE. Organizations with a really strong DTE measure everything. In that high volume prep training period, they're measuring things; they're ranking people; there competing. They create what is almost contrived competitions. All of that creates, I think, a hardened edge which allows people to go into competition with more confidence and more readiness.
 
In a strong training environment, you decide exactly what the lessons are and explain the aims of the activity. You rep the activity—if you will—by way of demonstration, and then rep it again under escalating pressure, and you create a real learning experience, almost to fail, if you will. Then you put a little bit of summary on it and people typically walk away with experiences which will really benefit them when real competition comes along."
 
Not by coincidence Coach Clark's approach was the same as Coach Wooden's. In an interview with Jan Stenker for Unconditionally Strong Clark discussed his approach to a cornerstone principle his Performance Culture embraces: "Improve Relentlessly":
 
"We believe in constant performance improvement. We say it's not just enough to win. If you go back to legendary basketball coach John Wooden's Pyramid of Success, you get performance over results. We believe that. We should be getting better from week to week, month to month, match to match. There are two kinds of teams. There are teams that are getting better and there are teams that are getting worse. There really isn't that much in between.
 
We kid ourselves that there are plateaus somewhere, but really, if you're not getting better you're most likely getting worse. We have to be able to document that we're getting better. It can't just be what's the score, because the level of the opponent plays a part in that, and the conditions plays a part. It has to be performance-generated data, not results generated.
 
The currency that is exchanged in any high-performance team, whether it's business or sports, is performance in the moment. Not your potential, not what you did last year, but what are you doing right now."
 
How do you measure performance improvement?

​Jack Clark is the University of California's varsity rugby head coach. His teams have won 28 National Championships in 33 years. A key principle of Clark's teams and their culture is to: Practice Resiliency. Clark makes this happen by insisting his teams buy into, believe and act with a very straight forward attitude: "Entitled to nothing, grateful for everything."
 
Entitled is defined as: "believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment."
 
Grateful is defined as: "feeling or showing an appreciation of kindness; thankful."
 
A person's attitude towards events, other people and in the long run their life in general, is either one of entitlement or gratitude. The two attitudes cannot co-exist with respect to the same event. In an interview with Jan Stenker for Unconditionally Strong, Clark discussed the impact the principle "Entitled to nothing, grateful for everything" has had on his team's performance:
 
"I think what matters most — outside of talent — would probably be the culture of the team: developing a really resilient, embedded team culture around performance. It's like anything else: You've got to rep it. You've got to talk about it on day one and day five and in the middle of the season and at the end of the season.
 
Our mindset is how we filter our values and how we talk about them. I think it's important now, more than ever before, because there is a lot of entitlement. But we say our mindset is "entitled to nothing, grateful for everything."
 
We're really happy when people do something for us and somebody washes our clothes or somebody puts on a meal for us. Anything that we get, we feel really grateful for it, but we don't really think we're entitled to much.
 
I mean you ask how you become resilient. Well, that's kind of it. You don't expect much — not from the ref, not from the opposition. If you're playing into the wind in both halves, that's just how it is. We just don't expect to get a break. That makes you tougher in a way."
 
Coach Wooden said: "Too often we just want things to work out the way we want them to but we don't want to pay the price, so to speak, of doing the things that would help that become reality."Coach Clark and Coach Wooden believe in gratitude and hard work, not entitlement.
 
Do you approach your job with an attitude of entitlement or gratitude? What is the approach of your team members?