Three-time 49ers Super Bowl champion, four-time Pro Bowl player, First-Team All-Pro and NFL’s Offensive Player of the Year in 1988 – running back Roger Craig knows the importance of being able to make real-time decisions on and off the field. In that 1988 season, he rushed for a career-high 1,502 yards, made 76 receptions and scored double-digit touchdowns.
Three years earlier, in 1985, he led the NFL in receptions, a feat that had never been accomplished before by a running back. That same year he was also the first player in league history to record 1,000 rushing and 1,000 receiving yards in the same season. How did he do it? By understanding, anticipating, and acting on plays and events just moments before they occurred – to score the winning touchdown.
“My belief in the two-second advantage grows constantly stronger because I witness its success, both on and off the field. Training HARD in the off-season gave me my two-second advantage with the 49ers. When my opponents got weaker as the game and the season wore on, I just got stronger. My body wouldn’t get tired because my mind was strong. This strength was stored in my mental database and was impossible to erase. The team this year will have success if they believe in the Harbaugh system. They need to study the Ravens, know their assignment, know their alignment and execute. That will be their two-second advantage. It’s going to be a great game.”
– Roger Craig, Three-time Super Bowl Champion, and TIBCO VP of Business Development
Off-the-Field Preparation Leads to On-the-Field Awareness
Now as a VP of Business Development at Tibco Software Inc., Craig is again a critical member of a high-performance team and spends his time helping organizations gain a Two-Second Advantage® by harnessing the power of real-time information. Whether it’s for efficient claims or trade processing, or averting a crisis before it happens – global enterprises must develop an event-enabled platform that allows them to:
- Make sense of big data and discover valuable insights
- Respond in real time while insight is still relevant
- Cross- and up-sell based on real-time customer behavior
- Govern data for trustworthy information
With advances in technology, the ability to make an in- the-moment, game time decision based on real-time information is becoming ever more critical in sports and increasingly critical for global organizations. The Two-Second Advantage, by Vivek Ranadivé and Kevin Maney, explores the subject of human mastery in sports, music, and business, revealing one key factor for great success — the ability to anticipate events before they happen.
“A little bit of the right information just a little beforehand – whether it is a couple of seconds, minutes, or hours – is more valuable than all of the information in the world six months after the fact… this is the Two-Second Advantage.”
– Vivek Ranadivé, CEO TIBCO Software Inc.
