Systems vs Principles

Tom Brady is the most successful American Football quarterback in history winning 7 Super Bowl championships.

Bill Belichick is one of the most success American Football coaches in history winning 6 Super Bowl championships.

They share 6 of those Super Bowl wins during their time together at the New England Patriots.?

They were the dominant team of the NFL for almost two decades.?

Between 2001 and 2019 their team won 17 division tiles, they took the Patriots to 9 Super Bowls and won 6.?

In March 2020, one year after wining the last of their shared 6 Super Bowls, and at the age of 43, Tom Brady left the Patriots.

It was the end of an era.?

Tom Brady joined to the Tapa Bay Buccaneers where the very next season, he managed to win one more Super Bowl, taking his total to 7.

Bill Belichick stayed at the Patriots, and by 2024 he had been let go by the Patriots after two consecutive loosing seasons.?

Tom Brady was a master of working the principles, so when the situation changed, he was able to adapt and help create a new winning system.?

Bill Belichick was a master at squeezing the most out of a system, but when the situation changed his system failed.

Adapting to a situation change can be a real struggle.

We've all seen people come into new companies, or roles, with great experience on paper, but when they try to implement the systems that worked for them in their previous roles, they fail.

It’s because they didn’t have a grip on the principles.

They were great at running the existing system and usually very good at optimising it, but they didn’t truly understand why and how that system worked.

When the systems they know starts to fail, they didn’t know how to go back to the principles and create a better strategy.?

There's a real difference between people who can build new systems and the people that can only optimise existing ones.

“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.”

―?W. Edwards Deming