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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.

Committee Work

January 6, 2015

The winter months are the busiest for MHSAA committees, especially for those that must review or prepare recommendations for changes for the following school year.

Each year, up to 20 MHSAA committees consider proposals for Representative Council action relative to MHSAA tournament policies or procedures or Handbook regulations or interpretations.

During school year 2014-15, wherever applicable, the committees are being asked to address health and safety issues as well as policies and procedures relative to subvarsity and junior high/middle school students; and as a result of positive 2014 Update Meeting Opinion Poll responses, each sport committee is being asked to respond during calendar year 2015 and beyond to several concepts for MHSAA tournament seeding.

MHSAA committees are dominated by coaches, but they are not a rubber stamp for proposals that proceed from that sport’s high school coaches association. The difference of opinion often results from the committee seeing things differently than a coaches association leadership that the committee believes is not representative of schools of diverse size, location and demographics.

It is appropriate for committees to ask: Who was not in the room when this recommendation was drafted? Who will not be served well by this change?

When committees go through this process, they tend to reduce the quantity but improve the quality of recommendations to the Representative Council, which increases the percentage of recommendations the Council adopts.