College Basketball is Over — Business is Not

Florida won the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship. Tennessee (my favorite women’s team) won the women’s.

All deferred questions from reporters about the future. Instead, they wanted to “celebrate the moment.”

They are right, of course. We should celebrate the wins in life. We should savor the hours, even days, of the hard fought victory. Excluding the athletic abilities, I am envious of sports when compared to business.

You see, sports has an off-season. The season ends. Until the fall, there will be no college basketball to see. The “season” of college basketball has ended and the champions are Florida and Tennessee.

For the next several months there will be time for recovery and preparation for the next season. This is not to say that a lot of work won’t be done. But the work doesn’t “officially” count. All that counts is with the “official” season starts and we all count the wins and losses by the team.

For Cubicle Warriors, there is no off season. There is no time to recover and prepare for the next season. Instead, we must continue to slog through every year working on multiple projects and problems. When the win comes, it is briefly recognized more as relief than as a win.

Cynical? You bet. But real. It’s hard to celebrate the wins in business because there is no season with a defined end. No off-season to recover and prepare. And the wins and losses are there every day, not on defined game days.

How we learn to recover, restore ourselves, and prepare ourselves for the next assignment is critical to winning in a season where there is no beginning and no end.

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