Everyone plays harder when there is a scoreboard.
Yet…
We’ve gotten away from keeping score in youth sports to avoid damaging kids’ self-esteem.
Worse yet…
In business, many companies have cut-throat, toxic cultures because of how they keep score.
Perhaps we just need to teach people the right way to keep score…
I’m an admirer of Warren Buffet, the world’s most successful investor and fourth richest man in the world. He lives a simple life in the same small home in Omaha that he bought for $30,000 back in 1955.
My favorite Buffet strategy is what he calls the inner scoreboard.
Your inner scoreboard is the set of standards by which you judge yourself. The outer scoreboard is when you allow your self-worth be predicated upon the judgment of others.
Buffet judges his investments on two criteria:
- Did the business help our customers?
- Did the business help our employees?
Note that he’s one of the richest entrepreneurs in America yet nowhere on his inner scoreboard is turning a profit mentioned. It’s a natural byproduct of helping his people and the customer.
It doesn’t matter if the media or public love an investment he made, if it doesn’t measure up to his two inner criteria, it wasn’t a success in his mind no matter how financially successful it may have been.
If your emphasis is on what the public is going to think about you, and you lose sight of how you should really behave, you’ll end up with an outer scoreboard that doesn’t serve anyone well.
What’s your inner scoreboard?
Inner relates to the concept of intrinsic value.
Outer scoreboard is based on market value alone.
Leaders of professional teams from MLB and World Cup Rugby to elite college coaches, business owners and CEOs are using this resource to helping their teams create and calibrate their inner scoreboard. And many report back that it’s absolutely transformed their lives.
You could be next.
