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In Others’ Words

August 22, 2014

I’ve read and heard multiple times – so I’ve come to believe it’s at least partly true – that one of the techniques that marketing departments or agencies use when developing campaigns to promote a product or service is to look at it from the consumer’s, customer’s or client’s perspective.

The point is often brought home that if management would use this technique as much as marketers, then management would be more effective and would label itself, rather than marketers, as the “creative team.” It chafes me to hear a CEO say he or she wants to know what “creative” has to say about a sponsorship initiative before the CEO will offer an opinion.

Thinking about what our customers want doesn’t require that leaders suspend their personal beliefs or reverse experience-based opinions. It merely asks that we look at things from a different and sometimes even opposite point of view. And to be truly revealing, it asks that we try to put into words where other people stand on a particular topic.

It asks us to actually try to describe what our customers see from where they stand and what they say they want. For example, in our work, it would ask administrators to think about and actually describe what coaches want, and vice versa. And it asks both coaches and administrators to think about and put into their own words what student-athletes want, and what their parents want.

This has been an ongoing part of my life, provoked I suppose by my marriage of 42 years to a woman whose political views often point 180 degrees from my own. And this approach has been especially enlightening on school sports’ most troublesome topics, some of which we are tackling at this time, like ...

  • Out-of-season coaching rules
  • Junior high/middle school programming
  • Health and safety mandates

Time and Money

March 29, 2016

Early in the current presidential campaign, several candidates postured to claim the support of Evangelical Christians. I found it all pretty phony. How do you know what’s really in a person’s heart?

I was once told that the best way to discern what may be in a person’s heart is to look at two indicators.

  1. Look at their calendar. How do they spend their time?
  2. Look at their checkbook. How do they spend their money?

Talk is cheap. What’s really important to a person is reflected in their calendar and checkbook (or credit card receipts): How do they spend their time and their money?

So, in this work of school sports, if we are truly committed to educational athletics, it will be obvious in how we – schools and the MHSAA – spend our time and money.

  • Do we daily spend time promoting and protecting our brand of youth sports?
  • Do we annually budget adequate funds for the purpose of designing, delivering and defending policies and programs that maximize the benefits of school sports to students, schools and society?

This will provide the proof of our commitment.