From the January 30, 2006 issue of Sports Illustrated (www.SI.com):
February 2006 …For a tactical decision (Pittsburgh Steeler Head Coach) Cowher made the day after that Cincinnati loss set the team on course for Detroit (to the Super Bowl Game to be played on Sunday, February 5)… …In a meeting room at the football team’s practice facility, there’s a board that charts the Pittsburgh Steelers’ performance week by week, a statistical tracking kept by most NFL clubs.
On Dec. 5, the 48-year-old coach Bill Cowher went to the board and removed all references to the first 12 games of the season and the last three, leaving only that week’s opponent, the Chicago Bears, for the players to ponder when they arrived later that day. “Clear your mind,” Cowher told them in the meeting. “The slate’s wiped clean. Forget the past. Forget the future. Only one thing matters: Chicago. Every week’s an elimination game now.”
The Bears, on an eight-game winning streak, went down in a snow squall 21-9. When the Steelers reported to work to prepare for their next opponent, the Minnesota Vikings (on a six-game win streak of their own), there was no evidence that Pittsburgh had even played Chicago.
The Steelers rolled over the Viking 18-3. Same story before the 41-0 rout of the Cleveland Browns and the 35-21 whipping of the Detroit Lions.
That 4-0 run down the stretch earned Pittsburgh the final wild-card spot, as the Chiefs limped home 2-2 and the Chargers staggered in 1-3.
“Coach put us in a playoff mode with four games left,” said Porter. “With some teams that works, with some maybe it doesn’t. But we’ve got guys who really respond to that.”
The live-in-the-moment vibe carried the Steelers through their 31-17 wild-card win at Cincinnati and their 21-18 upset of the top-seeded Indianapolis Colts in the divisional round.
Alone outside his locker room, after the Denver game, Cowher sounded like a preacher, extolling the virtues of this elementary approach. “You’ll be amazed—amazed—how fresh you feel when you forget everything in your life except what you’re doing right now,” he said.
In Susan Scott’s book “Fierce Conversations” she suggests that it is impossible to have a meaningful conversation of any consequence unless the participants are “here and nowhere else.”
Coach Bill Cowler of the Pittsburgh Steelers subscribed to that approach and his team will be playing in the Super Bowl.
Imagine how powerful, insightful and focused these interactions might become if you were “here and nowhere else” doing any one of these tasks: conducting a job interview; performing an evaluation of an employee; calling on a vendor; having a conversation with a coworker about a project; speaking and listening during a telephone conversation; sitting in a staff meeting; making a call on a client; working on an assignment at your desk.
Forget about multitasking and focus on the task at hand. Not only will you be more focused, but more will be accomplished at a higher quality level.
Manufacturing
