Chennai Super Kings played a “perfect” match according to their iconic, back-as-skipper emeritus MSD. Dhoni was at his wry, calmest, laconic best in the routine post-match presentation chat at the end of the IPL match against maverick captain Rishabh Pant’s Delhi Capitals side. Having posted more than 200 yet again, the bowlers also came to the party. The expatriate spinners and the indigenous young pacers launched the perfect script to play out. Newly married Kiwi Super King Devon Conway played the most significant role in treating the best team of spinners of the season with disdainful alacrity. No wonder “Thala” Dhoni (Tamil word for Thalaiva or leader) used a new term “Game Sense” to describe the intuitive professional clarity of focusing on what delivery to bowl or what stroke to play just at the nick of time or a split second before execution. A new “Dhonism” is born for management reference! Any professional who has the skills for the job and is chosen with clear role-clarity that he or she and the boss who pays are both agreed upon, then needs to move mentally to this next level that Dhoni calls “Game Sense”. In essence, it is the ability to focus neither “too loose nor too tight, but just right” This state of relaxed mindfulness is all about integrating Head, Heart and Hand. In other words, the body eases in obedient comfort to listen to the emotional call of the mind or heart, in this context. The playful, wandering or even the tense, uptight mind then unconditionally refits to listen to the Intellect or the head. Swami Chinmayananda’s B-M-I Model of Management is about Head, Heart and Hand coming together willingly in unison to produce the ‘locus of focus’ in an instant just before execution.
The same day, only a few hours ago on a different pitch in another arena just miles away in the other part of Mumbai, an iconic cricketing legend Virat Kohli inexplicably tapped the first ball of the innings for his Royal Challengers team from Bangalore straight into the hands of the lone fielder near him at midwicket for an abysmal dismissal for a duck yet again as a loud, frustrated groan filled the ground. While hearts sank for the global icon Virat, the rest of RCB, led by former Dhoni associate Faf Du Plessis found their mojo or their “Game Sense” quickly enough to stamp their authority over their hapless neighbouring rivals the Hyderabad Sunrisers. In the end, the collective “Game Sense” prevailed and therein lies a great management lesson on COLLABORATION. Intuitively one can go with the flow and do what needs to be done, leaving all the analysis to the passionate spectators or commentators.
T20 cricket is about 120 balls per team or 120 opportunities to score a maximum of upto 720 runs on paper as a human impossibility! It can also mean 120 opportunities to produce 10 wicket-taking deliveries – sounds so easy to do! Yet, all management is not at all that simple on paper. Someone once defined it very nicely. “Management is what happens outside one’s Head and how one responds to it from inside one’s Head!”