Did It Work Archives - Page 3 of 4

You Are What Your Record Says You Are

“You are what your record says you are.” The line is credited to the football coach Bill Parcells. In January 1994 a newspaper column credited it to “a wise man with a bad football team and a Super Bowl ring.” That man was Parcells, then in his first year as coach of the New England Patriots.

The column’s point was that nobody wants to hear excuses about injuries, bad luck or a hard schedule. The line is older than Parcells’s use of it. The San Diego Union printed it in October 1978, under the headline “Chargers Get Foes’ Praise, Not Victories”: “You are what your record says you are, and never mind how you got that way.”

MacGyver

MacGyver ran on American television from 1985 to 1992. Its hero, Angus MacGyver, was played by Richard Dean Anderson. He carried a Swiss Army knife and duct tape instead of high-tech weapons. He regularly solved problems with whatever simple things he could find.

His name became a verb. Merriam-Webster defines MacGyver as “to make, form, or repair (something) with what is conveniently on hand.” The dictionary dates its first known use to 1992.

Trust the Process

As general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, Sam Hinkie traded away the team’s most valuable players for high picks in the NBA draft, and the team lost in the meantime. The plan became known as the Process, and “Trust the Process” became the fans’ slogan. In the 2015–16 season the 76ers won 10 games and lost 72.

After a 1–21 start that season, the team brought in Jerry Colangelo as chairman of basketball operations. Hinkie stepped down on April 6, 2016, before the team had a winning season.

Innovation Theater

Steve Blank, who teaches at Stanford, coined the term innovation theater. It describes what happens when large companies try to copy startup culture. In 2019 he wrote about it in the Harvard Business Review, with hackathons as one example.

In his words, the result is “coffee cups, lanyards, posters, and very little output that moves the top or bottom line.”

Moneyball

The Oakland Athletics, working with one of the smallest payrolls in baseball, used statistical analysis to identify undervalued players and won more games than teams spending several times as much.

The scouts hated it. The methods were unorthodox, the reasoning was unfamiliar, and it produced wins — which ended the argument.

Batting average

A number carried to three decimal places, quoted from memory by ordinary fans, and applied outside baseball to anything from hiring to sales calls. The unit of judgment is what actually happened, divided by how many times you tried.

The scoreboard

American sports put the current result in the largest object in the building, visible from every seat, updated continuously. Nobody argues with it, and there is no separate record of who played better.

The vocabulary of results

Results-oriented. A standard phrase on an American résumé. The claim is not that the person works hard or knows the field, but that they can be judged by what came out.

Deliverables. American project language names the output as the unit of work. Not tasks, not effort, not hours. The thing handed over.

Track record. Not qualifications, not references, not what someone believes about themselves. What has already been produced, and can be pointed at.

Best practice. Methods are adopted from a competitor, another industry, another country, on the grounds that they work. There is no loyalty in the concept — the practice earns its place by outcome and loses it the same way.

Return on investment. Every expenditure becomes a candidate for the calculation, including training, meetings, research and attention. The question is not whether the thing is good. It is what came back.

Figures of speech

The bottom line. An accounting term — the last line of the statement, where profit or loss appears — that became the general American word for the thing that finally matters. Everything above it is detail.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Not the recipe, not the cook’s reputation, not how it looks coming out of the oven.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Popularized by Bert Lance in the Carter administration. A working thing requires no examination of why it works.

Whatever works. Offered as a resolution rather than a shrug. It closes a debate about approach by declining to have one.

Don’t tell me, show me. An objection to the form of an answer rather than its content. Description is treated as insufficient in principle, whatever it describes.

A/B testing

Show half your users one version, half the other, and let the numbers decide. No argument, no theory, no meeting. The disagreement is resolved by running both and reading the result.