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Silence is Golden

July 2, 2013

During the summer weeks, "From the Director" will bring to you some of our favorite entries from previous years. Today's blog first appeared Oct. 22, 2010.

A minor repair to a vocal cord forced me into 48 hours of silence recently.  I rather enjoyed it and, frankly, was a little sorry to see it end.

You see, when you can’t talk, you’re forced to listen; and when you can’t talk, you’re more inclined to think.  Not “think before you speak,” just think.

I’ll spare you the time spent counting my many blessings, as well as the time worrying about a few family matters. But I’ll share with you some thoughts I had about our common ground, that is, school-sponsored sports in Michigan.

I believe the future of school sports hangs in the balance of how we respond to the financial pressures local programs now experience.  It worries me that too many responses are putting local programs on a course that will fundamentally and forever knock school sports off the course of educational athletics.

  • We are mistaken if we believe a $225 participation fee to play JV tennis doesn’t change the nature of JV tennis.
  • We are mistaken if we believe that a competitive athletic program, with high emotion and risk of injury, can be administered by inexperienced or part-time athletic administrators without clerical and event supervision assistance.
  • We are mistaken if we believe that we can operate educational athletics without our coaches involved in ongoing education regarding the best practices of working with adolescents.

It isn’t educational athletics if the program does not promote broad and deep participation and does not have expert leadership and coaching.

 That is what I thought about.  And what I intend to speak about.

Innovation Obstacles

April 12, 2013

It doesn’t take long to compile a dozen or more examples of products or businesses that have disappeared, or nearly so, because the world changed while the product or business did not.

Think eight-track tapes and players.  Consider what digital photography has done, from the Eastman Kodak Company to out-of-business local studios.  What the Internet has done to travel agents.  See what’s happened and still happening to print newspapers across the country, to magazines, and to both local and large chain bookstores.

It is not at all rare that businesses fail to reinvent themselves.  For many reasons, including admirable passion for what they are doing, business leaders often miss the trends or ignore the signs that suggest the need to change their products or their entire business model.

As Geoff Colvin wrote in FORTUNE magazine Feb. 25, 2013, “Business model innovation is a competency that doesn’t exist in most companies.”  He continued:  “The largest obstacles will be weak imaginations, threatened interests, and culture.”

I suspect that those are also the three major obstacles we must overcome as we think about the future of interscholastic athletics.

  • Does school-based sports, with a 100-year-old history, have a 50 or even 15 year future in schools and society?

  • If so, should the business model change?  And if so, how?

I suspect that some of what we think is change may be no better than rotating bald tires on our car; when what we really need is new tires, or no tires at all.