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Values Trump Rules

November 19, 2013

The last two postings, which were about rules and rule-making, have quoted from how:  Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything by Dov Seidman. The book deserves at least this additional commentary.

Mr. Seidman posits that in the modern world of hyperconnectivity and transparency (which he describes in detail), there is no such thing as “private” behavior. It’s all public and, therefore, how we do things is more important than what we do.

He states that to stand out in a positive way, an enterprise must “outbehave” the competition. And he says, such behaviors do not follow rules, they flow from values.

This means, according to Seidman, that effective leadership in this environment will be less about coercion (rules) and more about inspiration (values). Leaders will spend less time talking about the carrots and sticks of managing people, and more time focusing on “values and missions worthy of their commitment.”

It’s a shift from “task-based jobs” to “values-based missions;” a transformation from “command and control” to “connect and collaborate” leadership. “It’s a move from exerting power over people to generating waves through them.”

Instead of talking about organizations that are too big to fail, Seidman says we will have organizations “that are too sustainable to fail, too principled to fail, and too good to fail.”

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.