Keep It Simple Stupid

Once an English Premier League Football club recruited a young, brilliant South American Footballer to play for them. The English Football Coaches (most of the coaches) conduct elaborate pre match theoretical training sessions. Those days it was using a blackboard and a chalk.

The coach had drawn a football field on the Blackboard and was explaining the positioning of various players, their purported movements, positional play etc etc. The South American after 10 minutes was frankly bored.The coach droned on for an hour. Fed up, the young player got up, went upto the Blackboard, took the chalk piece from the Coach and DREW A ZIGZAG LINE FROM HIS GOAL POST TO THE OPPOSITE GOAL POST and said, "Maan, just take the ball from our Goal line and zig zag zoom, run all the way to the other goal post, shoot and hey it is a Gggggggggggooooooooooaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllll"

I was reminded of this story when I watched Sehwag bat yesterday. In an era where the backroom team of analysts is more than the number of players in the team, Sehwag is a class apart. Not for him all these fuddy duddy theories. He goes out, and just hits the ball, as long, as far, as hard as he can - irrespective of whether it is Brett Lee, Steve Harmison, Daniel Vettori, Daryl Stein or anyone else. He epitomises the KISS philosophy - Keep It Simple Stupid.

In less than a session, he has turned the Test Match upside down, has set up India to win and threw all statistics and fourth innings run chasing theory to the wind.

I have been following Indian Cricket for nearly three and a half decades. I can positively say that there has been no other Match Winner like Sehwag. There were better batsmen definitely - Gavaskar, Viswanath, Sachin, VVS, but for sheer match winning ability Sehwag stands head and shoulder above them.

Sometimes I do feel Management professionals are like modern day coaches. They theoratise so much about so many things that they forget the basic purpose of business - Give the customer what they want, in the quality they want, at an affordable price.