Planning & Doing
January 31, 2012
One of the MHSAA’s counterpart organizations in another state recently asked to see the business plans of other statewide high school associations. Some of the states supplied their detailed budgets, but most had nothing to offer.
Of course, a budget is a much different thing than a business plan. A budget is built more on past performance, while a business plan looks more to the potential of future problems and opportunities. A business plan is much more than numbers.
Since 2007 we’ve been using a “Mission Action Plan” (MAP) at the MHSAA. It was developed to deal with the opportunities and obstacles of three powerful trends: (1) growth of non-school youth sports programs; (2) expansion of educational alternatives to traditional neighborhood schools; and (3) proliferating technology.
While not a typical business plan or a classic “strategic plan,” the “MAP” has become increasingly useful to point the way for the MHSAA both in terms of program and finance. The MAP states a single “Overarching Purpose;” it identifies four “Highest Priority Goals;” and it lists four multi-faceted “Current Strategic Emphases,” many of which have quantifiable performance targets, including financial goals.
Next to each Current Strategic Emphasis are two boxes. The first is checked if we’ve gotten started, and the second is checked when we’ve completed the task or are operating at the level we had established as our goal. At this point, every MAP strategy has been launched, but only a portion have earned the second checkmark.
Quite efficiently, the MAP keeps us both strategic and businesslike without the formality of purer forms of strategic or business plans.
Urgency
November 8, 2011
I still have in my files and in my mind Joe Klein’s Newsweek editorial of Sept. 21, 1992, that took Bill Clinton to task for his “small themes” during the closing months of his campaign for the U.S. presidency.
Never one to be shy in his bully pulpit at Newsweek (or in his then anonymously published novel Primary Colors based on the 1992 Democratic presidential primary), Klein wrote that Clinton’s late campaign efforts were “rhetorically flaccid, intellectually unadventurous, morally undemanding.”
In response, Clinton’s campaign strategist, James Carville, resorted to a sports metaphor: “The way to the goal line is to keep running off tackle. Four yards and a cloud of dust.”
This “take no chances, do no harm, run out the clock” spirit and strategy that so infuriated Klein will not be seen at the MHSAA. Expectations and efforts will be in continuous crescendo no matter how close the goal line gets. In fact, as it is with any good football team in the “red zone,” the closer the goal line looms, the greater the sense of urgency there will be.
There is no greater proof at this moment to our most inner circle of constituents – high school athletics directors – than the MHSAA’s work with ArbiterSports to become the first state high school association in America to develop, and to deliver at least initially at no cost to all member high schools, a comprehensive suite of electronic tools for athletic department administration. This is a responsibility, and risk, that could have been left to others; but we’re being motivated by undertaking the task here and now – first in the nation – so that the product is tailor-made for high school sports, Michigan’s way.