Continuing Education
February 17, 2012
Eight MHSAA staff devoted an entire Friday late last month to discussions with a visitor from another statewide high school association. The focus was on what that association was doing, how and why in the areas of electronic media, marketing, merchandising and branding and the dozens of sub-topics these categories spawned.
Two weeks earlier, five MHSAA staff joined staff of ten other similar associations for two days of meetings in Chicago. There was sharing on topics ranging from student leadership programs to information technology.
A few days before that, I joined my counterparts from 45 other states for discussions of a variety of topics important to school sports in general or the administration of our serving organizations. I amassed 13 pages of notes from comments made by speakers and colleagues over three days.
Meanwhile, the MHSAA office hosted 12 MHSAA committee meetings during January. Each committee focused on a particular sport, or on a specific topic that affects all sports. Their recommendations will be vetted this spring and considered by the Representative Council by May.
Ideally, every month presents opportunities for us to learn, but last month provided a particularly broad and deep curriculum.
Innovation Obstacles
April 12, 2013
It doesn’t take long to compile a dozen or more examples of products or businesses that have disappeared, or nearly so, because the world changed while the product or business did not.
Think eight-track tapes and players. Consider what digital photography has done, from the Eastman Kodak Company to out-of-business local studios. What the Internet has done to travel agents. See what’s happened and still happening to print newspapers across the country, to magazines, and to both local and large chain bookstores.
It is not at all rare that businesses fail to reinvent themselves. For many reasons, including admirable passion for what they are doing, business leaders often miss the trends or ignore the signs that suggest the need to change their products or their entire business model.
As Geoff Colvin wrote in FORTUNE magazine Feb. 25, 2013, “Business model innovation is a competency that doesn’t exist in most companies.” He continued: “The largest obstacles will be weak imaginations, threatened interests, and culture.”
I suspect that those are also the three major obstacles we must overcome as we think about the future of interscholastic athletics.
-
Does school-based sports, with a 100-year-old history, have a 50 or even 15 year future in schools and society?
-
If so, should the business model change? And if so, how?
I suspect that some of what we think is change may be no better than rotating bald tires on our car; when what we really need is new tires, or no tires at all.