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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.

Hall of Fame Heritage

April 29, 2014

Here are two little known facts. The chair of the first-ever high school level swimming & diving rules committee was Allen W. Bush, the MHSAA’s second full-time executive director. And yours truly, the MHSAA’s fourth full-time executive director, was the editor of the committee’s first rule book published by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS).

This connection to the sport of swimming & diving early in my career has caused me to keep track of some of the sport’s key personnel, including Dave Robertson (IL), Dennis McGinly (PA), Dick Hannula (WA) and Glenn Kaye (FL) who all served on the first NFHS committee and are now in the National Interscholastic Swimming Coaches Association (NISCA) Hall of Fame. 

Last month in Austin, Texas, NISCA inducted Ann Arbor-Pioneer’s legendary coach Dennis Hill into its Hall of Fame. Dennis coached boys swimming & diving for 45 years and girls swimming & diving for 38 years at Pioneer. He did so with both grace and great success, and it saddens me to learn that this gentleman has announced his well-deserved retirement.

Dennis was preceded into NISCA’s Hall of Fame by Michigan coaches G. Robert Mowerson (1975-Battle Creek), Willard Cooley (1980-Jackson), C. William Brandell (1984-Battle Creek-Lakeview), William Reaume (1988-Detroit-Denby), William Laury (1989-Detroit-Cody), Michael Lane (1998-Bloomfield Hills-Andover), and Richard Edwards (2010-Lansing-Eastern). 

It’s people like these who have made and maintained Michigan’s excellent reputation among school-based swimming & diving programs across the US, overcoming the early efforts of the first wet-behind-the-ears rule book editor.