I had one of those aha moments the other day.

I spent the weekend with some old friends in Austin. We played golf on Friday, stayed at the AT&T Executive Conference Center, and spent the weekend exploring various watering holes. As a Texas-Ex and former member of the UT golf team, it was great to visit some old places, see some familiar faces, and have a wildly fun time.

I don’t get to play much golf anymore and I still have the same clubs I graduated with in 2003. That may not seem like a long time, but to put it in tech terms, that’s like using a fax machine to send a tweet. The balls, clubs, shafts – everything has advanced a lot in seven years.

One of my good friends pursued golf as a profession after college and has done very well for himself in New York. He has worked as a playing professional at a couple of prestigious golf clubs and continues to compete professionally in various events. At the beginning of our round on Friday he commented on my equipment and showed me some of the new clubs he had just put in his bag. I shrugged my shoulders a bit, teed up a ball, and then (amazingly) ripped it right down the middle of the fairway. “These old things still work pretty good for a hacker like me,” I said. He laughed and proceeded to put one about 15 yards past me. Nice.

The Game Changes, but it Stays the Same

On the way home to Houston I started to think about our round of golf. I was thinking about how much golf has changed since I started playing competitively twenty years ago. The balls are now engineered for specific spin rates, trajectory and distance. The club heads are twice as big as they used to be, with huge sweet spots and optimized centers of gravity. The shafts have probably made the biggest leap; you can now be fitted for the perfect combination of weight, flex, torque, and kick.
The courses have changed dramatically too; new golf course designs are typically 500+ yards longer than their predecessors from 20 years ago. Even Augusta National, home of the Masters, has been lengthened 500 yards since 1990. And don’t forget about the players. They’re bigger, faster, stronger. They actually exercise now!
I was thinking through all of this and that’s when my aha moment occurred.

The game of golf hasn’t changed at all.

The basics are the same from two hundred years ago.

• You need a consistent swing that somehow manages to get you back to square at impact.
• You need a really good short game
• You have to be able to make some putts.

That’s pretty much it.

I know that’s proven extremely hard to do for most people, but the point is that it doesn’t matter what you do it with. The tools can change and the landscape can change, but the basics are the same. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone with a brand new set of clubs in their bag and not the slightest clue how to use them. Strangely enough, no matter how much money they spend on new balls and clubs, their handicap never dips below 20.

It Relates to Customer Experience

Business is the same way. People get caught up in the new tools and trends and they forget about the basics of what creates a remarkable customer experience. Do you really need to spend hours per day on Twitter consoling your angry customers? Could you spend those hours fixing the issue that’s making them angry in the first place?

Is your IT director pushing that brand new CRM package that your competitor just installed? Shouldn’t you develop a great relationship with your customer first, and then worry about actually managing it?

Are you putting together a small army to develop a killer social media strategy? What about the people that are walking in your door and calling you on the phone; have you perfected those interactions yet?

You need to master the basics before you jump head first into the latest fad.

• Make a great product
• Market the product and the experience it creates
• Support the product with amazing customer service

Do those things and repeat. Everything else will fall into place.

Question: Where are you spending time/energy/resources that could be better spent on the basics?