DECIDING

Four of the twelve fundamentals of DECIDING include:

• Choose, with care, which decisions deserve your attention. Focus first on the critical decisions that will have the greatest impact.

• Postponing or avoiding a decision on a problem or opportunity is a decision. Often, it is not a good decision. Look for problems and opportunities. Get your arms around them.

• Gather all the facts. Be curious. Talk to others and listen, really listen, to what they have to say. Get expert advice, if necessary; not just on the decision itself, but on how you’re going to implement it. Get different points of view from different groups of people.

• Collect questions to ask. Because “the question that has not been asked cannot be answered,” get questions from anyone who is knowledgeable about the subject.

One of the most memorable moments in sports history—the remarkable defeat of the Soviet men’s ice hockey team by the United States during the 1980 Olympic games in Lake Placid, New York—was as dependent on good decision-making as it was on athletic ability. The individual we have to thank for that moment is coach Herb Brooks.

No one in his right mind would have bet on the young U.S. team Brooks pulled together for the 1980 games. The Soviet Union had won five of the previous six Olympic gold medals and had dominated international “amateur” hockey for years.

Just a few weeks before the Olympics, the Soviets had routed the Americans 10-3 in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden. Yet, in the semifinals at the Olympics, the U.S. team took a 4-3 lead against the Soviets with 10 minutes left to play. All they had to do then was to hold the Russians back, which they did. As the final seconds ticked away, an overwrought announcer exclaimed, “Do you believe in miracles?”

He should have shouted, “Do you believe in decisions?”

The story of Herb Brooks and his winning team is about decisions—one good one after another—from his initial decision to coach the team to the decision to switch out his players every 35 to 40 seconds rather than up to 90 seconds for the Russians. The “miracle on ice” would not have happened had any of those decisions not been made correctly.

Brooks carefully considered every single player proposed for the team. Every one he accepted represented a significant decision on Brooks’ part, as did every player he turned away. “I’m not looking for the best players,” he told a colleague. “I’m looking for the right players.”

Once Brooks had chosen his team, he decided how to motivate them, how to play them, and how to rest them. Thinking goalie Jim Craig might need a little “inspiration”, Brooks told him that he might have made a mistake playing him so much. Any other player might have been devastated by a comment like that. But not Craig. It made him angry, angry enough to face the Russian onslaught with confidence. Brooks, constantly on the alert for problems and opportunities, wasn’t above making everyone mad at him if it improved their chances of winning.

He gathered all the facts. Brooks not only studied every member of his team, he studied every player on the Soviet team, as well, until he knew their strengths and weaknesses as well as those of his own team. It paid off. He found their weak spots and took advantage of them.

When the Lake Placid game was over, Valery Vasiliev said, “After we were ahead at the end of the second period, we were already celebrating. Nobody can skate with us in the third period.”

“Play your game. Play your game,” Brooks kept telling his players as he paced behind them on the bench. He said the words from the side of his mouth. For all his demands on the players for all those months, he was a different person when he managed a game behind the bench, a thin-lipped general who exuded confidence and control and rarely lost his cool.

As a result the Americans were able to keep the Russians at bay for 10 agonizing minutes. When the final buzzer sounded, the arena exploded. The results of that single moment, all those good decisions, continue to reverberate today.

Ironically, it was a bad decision that brought Brooks’ brilliant career and life to a very sad end in the summer of 2003. He fell asleep at the wheel of his car on his way to the airport and was thrown from it as it rolled off the road. Sustaining fatal injuries, he died at the scene. Most agree the accident was survivable, had Brooks made the decision to wear his seatbelt that day.