MADDON BECOMES "PROCESS-ORIENTED" WITH THE CUBS

There's a great article on Chicago Cubs' manager Joe Maddon written by Mark Gonzales of the Chicago Tribune.  You can read the entire article here but there were some direct takeaways the resonated with me.  The first, as all outstanding leaders, Maddon is a continual learner and his philosophy evolved from conversations with a football coach.  That evolvement included a great understanding for being process-oriented in his approach.

Cubs manager Joe Maddon has a great appreciation for football coaches, particularly assistant head coach Tom Moore of the Arizona Cardinals who won three Super Bowls with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Colts.

Before the Cubs’ 3-2 comeback win over the Washington Nationals on Tuesday night, Maddon spoke of how he learned from Moore that in football, teams are trying to break the other team’s will.

“And how do you do that?” Maddon said. “Through the relentless execution of fundamentals and technique. Not one time do you talk about winning? Not once. I don’t even know if when I’ve talked to our guys this year, if I’ve talked about winning a lot.

“I’ve talked about process a lot. So a lot of my philosophy was validated through Coach Moore, whom I have a ton of respect for.

“When you come down to really these close moments between winning and losing, everyone wants to win every night. I want to win. How do you do that? Through the relentless execution of fundamentals and technique. The better we get at that, the more often we’re going to win and win one-run games.”

“You got to understand it’s not easy to fight through that at that age with that lack of experience.”
But Maddon continues to stress his theme of doing simple better.

“It’s not a complicated issue,” Maddon said. “The more basic we can become in our approach, the more successful we’ll become.”