Why the Bulldogs win
It’s Grand Final time in Australia’s Football League. A blog from a lifelong Western Bulldog fan. What gives the Dogs the high-velocity edge?
On September 25th the Western Bulldogs play the Melbourne Demons in the Australian Rules Football’s Grand Final. That combination has happened only once before, in 1954, and I was there as a seven-year-old crazed supporter of the Bulldogs. My grandfather was a Demons fan, and that day the Bulldogs won their first Premiership, ever. One of us went home happy that day.
This year the game will be played in Perth, at Optus Stadium, thanks to Covid-19. 60,000 fans will be there. Four times that many applied online for tickets, but the seat limit was reached in minutes.
We Australians are passionate about our own special brand of football. (“Footy” is the local common term). In normal years the Final would be played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne in front of 100,000 plus hyper-partisan fans, with TV Viewers in the millions.
Why do I believe my favorite team will win this year? Because its coach has adopted the traits and culture of high-velocity continuous improvement and this is the essence of what makes great organizations exceptional. If you want to see the this philosophy in action, look no further than the coaching style of Australia’s Luke Beveridge, who has yet again brought his team to the verge of winning the Grand Final, the Aussie-rules football equivalent of the Super Bowl.
Beveridge has been coaching the Australian Football League’s Western Bulldogs team since 2015. Before Beveridge, the Bulldogs had won only that one Grand Final, in 1954. After Beveridge took over, they played and won the Grand Final in 2016, breaking their 62-year drought, and will play in the Grand Final again in 2021.
So what makes Beveridge exceptional? For one, he experiments more often than his rivals. For each game during the season he has to select 23 from 44 players, and he has tried out more of the 44 than any other coach—a key factor in retaining top talent. More of them get more chances to show their capabilities.
Beveridge has also been fearless in having his players play different roles, and these cross-training experiments give him a greater chance of finding higher-performing combinations among his players. They also give him more flexibility when the inevitable injury suddenly makes a key player unavailable. This provides resilience in some of the most demanding situations. It’s as if every single one of the 44 team members is an active and good understudy for at least one or two other roles and can be called upon to play with top team performance at a moment’s notice.
Beveridge’s analytical and experimental style showed up back in 2006-2008, when he was coaching one of the Victorian Football Association’s amateur teams. He took a team that was a steady C-league team and brought it to being an A-league team that won three amateur premierships along the way.
High-velocity continuous improvement is a culture that sets out to encourage a faster pace of learning from experience, then adapting at a pace that is sustainably faster than that of your rivals. Global success stories like Toyota have shown the way to great business success with this approach. It has been well documented in the book, “The High Velocity Edge,” by Dr. Steven Spear of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
So when the game is played on September 25, I and my Melbourne family and friends will all be cheering the Western Bulldogs to victory. Both teams have star players and both have had great seasons, but only one team has the high-velocity edge and so it will be no accident if (and when) they win their third premiership and the second in five years. In a game of inches and sub-second decision-making, that edge is what makes the difference.
