I never cease to be amazed at the similarities between the game of baseball and life in general, but more specifically, our career in the financial services industry. Look at the recent playoff series between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The seven game series had the Yankees leading 3 games to none and playing super baseball. Everybody in the world that knew anything about baseball knew that no team in the history of the game had ever come back from 0-3 to win four games in a row and win the championship series.

Everybody knew that Boston couldn’t come back to win four games in a row. But they didn’t have to win four in a row. All they had to do was win today’s game, that’s all, just win the one game today.

So how is this baseball championship series like our business? What’s the first thing we learn about what “everybody” says? What everybody says is always wrong. When everybody is buying stock, start moving money to conservative, income producing investments. When everybody is talking about how horrible things are, start moving money into the market. Everybody is always wrong.

Look at your business for this year. Are you to the point where you need 14 homeruns back to back before you can get close to a good year? You don’t need to win 4 in a row. You just need to win one today. Tomorrow’s game and next month, they take care of themselves. Just win one today.

The next two months are the most critical months of the year for us. Start now to build your momentum for 2005. Don’t worry about next March, August, or October. Start building your momentum now and let it carry you into next year. Just win the game today. That’s what the Red Sox did. They just won today’s game. And by the time they got to game 7, there was no way they could have lost that game. Their momentum carried the day and it carried them right on through to the World Series Championship. Your momentum will do the same for you. Just win one today.

Today I’d like to share with you some amazing results from a study I’m just completing. A company came to us to ask if we could help them raise production in their offices. In studying their top performers and their bottom performers we found a shocking correlation. At least it was shocking to them.

We have long thought of behavioral style as an “Energy Model” rather than a personality profile. Our theory is that if you build your business to take advantage of your individual strengths (seen in your behavioral style), then you will perform with more energy and be much more productive. Think of yourself as a “power tool.” Yes, you can run on battery and for a short period of time you might be able to run real well. But eventually, it is inevitable that you will run down to the point that you won’t be able to run at all. On the other hand, if we plug you directly into the power source, you can virtually run forever.

So what is this “power source?” It’s your behavioral style. When you are using behaviors that are out of step with your own strengths, it’s like continually climbing uphill or running on “battery.” You might get to the top but you will pay a terrible price to get there, and you won’t stay very long. However, if you build your business around your strengths you will be continually energized. The job itself will energize you and you will be much more productive.

The shocking correlation in our study was that all the top producers have behavioral styles very similar, if not identical, to the manager’s behavioral style. The bottom producers have behavioral styles almost opposite to the manager’s. On the surface this is a “so what.” But when we started looking at the behavioral characteristics of all the producers, we found that many of the bottom producers had characteristics that should have served them well in the business. Likewise, many of the top producers exhibited characteristics that should have made it very difficult for them to be “top producers.”

Bottom line: The bottom producers are being managed, coached, directed into doing the business in a way that does not take advantage of their individual strengths. It may be that we have the managers saying: “I’m successful, be like me.” The problem is that everybody is not like me. Instead of “be like me” let’s try “You Be You” and see what happens.

Make yourself a great day!

Ron Keese