Risk Taking
February 14, 2012
The June 22, 2009 cover story of Business Week which I just reread was titled “The Risk Takers.” It featured businesses which during difficult times, instead of playing it safe, placed bets on some gutsy new strategies.
To make a point, the author used an illustration that we can relate to here in Michigan. I paraphrase:
Imagine a driver on a snowy night. If the car starts to slip, the driver’s natural instinct is to slam on the brakes and jerk the steering wheel in the opposite direction. But the laws of physics advise the opposite: laying off the brakes and steering into the turn.
The author reports that from 1985 to 2000, the average merger in an economic downturn created an 8.5 percent rise in shareholder value after two years; while the average deal in good times resulted in a 6.2 percent drop in the buyer’s share value. In other words, mergers – one of the biggest, boldest moves in business – do better in bad times than good. Much better, in fact.
It wasn’t recklessness this article was celebrating; it was risk taking – daring to be aggressive, rather than just defensive, amid a weak economy. Steering into the turn, so to speak.
Just like the winter driving analogy in the article, we who are involved in school sports in Michigan can relate to the big idea of the article because we too made some of our biggest moves at our bleakest times. The MHSAA retrenched in some ways, but the greater theme as we climbed out of our bad times of 2008 was that we made unprecedented investments in new technology.
Today MHSAA.com is the website of highest traffic and MHSAA.tv is the website with the most productions of any comparable organization in the U.S. And all of these investments in technology during those bad times have allowed us to undertake the ArbiterGame project now that will provide all member high schools the electronic tools necessary to make their tough tasks of school administration more streamlined than ever before.
Sounds of Silence
April 12, 2015
I write in the early morning hours for the same reason birds sing then – it’s quiet. Birds can hear their voices, and I can hear my thoughts.
It is during the uncontested moments of the day that I can try out ideas – test them on paper. Yes, on paper! My most creative and productive process still employs a legal pad, a pencil and an eraser. The physical process of writing the words, looking at them, and often erasing what doesn’t make sense to my mind or sound right to my ear as I read it aloud.
The task of written communication has become more difficult during the four decades I’ve been engaged in this enterprise. While the work has become more complex and requires more nuanced discussion, the space available for careful comment has been reduced. Pretending cleverness or profundity, texts and tweets often do more harm than good to promote creative and productive discourse.
I am rarely provided the luxury of long-form journalism in this modern age. Even a “feature” article in a prestigious national professional journal is expected to be less than 1,500 words.
Modern scribes must boil down complicated matters to brief blogs like this one, hoping in a few short paragraphs to share an insight worth reading and to suggest a response worth doing.
The insight here? Silence is golden.
The suggested response? Seek a solitary space to describe and defend what it is that you hear in that silence.