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As my beloved Red Sox head to the golf course, rather than the playoffs, I’m going to try and reflect on the season and what went wrong. Anyone who knows me is well aware of how painful this is going to be.
During the offseason, the Red Sox pulled off two of the biggest free agent signings in baseball. Subsequently, all the commentators awarded the World Series to the Red Sox, despite the fact that no games had actually been played. The rationale was that the team was so talented that no one else could match up to them. The Red Sox started the season slow, then caught fire during the summer. For several months it looked like the analysts had been right and the season was just a formality. Then came September, and the greatest collapse in the history of baseball. Now the rumor mill has kicked up and there is talk of a team that played with a sense of entitlement, rather than competing hard for every game. What went wrong? The same players who were unbeatable during the summer couldn’t win a T-ball game in September.
I think that the season was a reminder that there are no guarantees, and that what happened in the past has very little bearing on the present. What matters is how the challenges of each day are met. The Red Sox seemed to think that September was just a formality. They forgot to compete. The collapse wasn’t the fault of any one play, or any one player. It was the result of an attitude that was reflected by the whole team.
The season was also a reminder that there is someone else out there who wants the prize as badly as we do. The Red Sox thought that the Rays would throw in the towel and stop competing. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell this to the Rays. They fought, scratched and clawed their way through September and won the Wild Card on the last day of the season.
Every successful organization faces these same challenges, and ComNet is no different. The core of ComNet’s success is customer service. Our customers trust us because of our willingness to go the extra mile and outperform the competition. The trust then evolves into long-term business relationships. Our ability to remain stable through the economic storm around us has been largely due to our success in developing and maintaing these long-term customer relationships. If we didn’t have these relationships, the last couple of years would have been a very different story.
In business, our customers are the prize that we compete for. One of the most frightening things that I can hear someone say around ComNet is that “our customers couldn’t survive without us”. Past performance is no guarantee, and we’re just fooling ourselves if we think that our customers aren’t continually evaluating ComNet and looking to see if there is a better alternative. We’re also fooling ourselves if we forget that we have competitors working toward the same goals that we are. Somewhere out there is another group of people building an organization based on service and trust. You can be sure that they are meeting with our customers and telling them how they can do it better and cheaper.
I believe in ComNet and its employees. Our success to date has been based on your willingness to meet the challenges as they arise, and it will be the key to our success going forward. If you could talk to a Red Sox player today, they would tell you that it’s a lot better than blowing the dust off your golf clubs.
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