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.
One More Call
November 23, 2011
This blog continues with lessons learned on my highly motivating but sometimes hot seat at the MHSAA. It’s Lesson No. 4: Make one more call.
Not 100 percent of the time, but well over 50 percent of the time, if I had made one more call before making or communicating a tough decision, either the decision would have been different or, more often, the decision would have been received better.
Obviously there are limits to this. There always could be one more call. But it has become a “Roberts Rule of Order” anyway to make one more call. For I can trace an inordinate percentage of wrong decisions, or bad reactions to correct decisions, to not making one more call.
More often than not on difficult decisions, I work in tandem with other MHSAA staff and especially Associate Director Tom Rashid who now routinely makes that one more call. It has improved both our decisions and communications.