A while back I sat in attendance as former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, baseball's ambassador-at-large, delivered an hour-long speech to employees of Staedtler Inc., a manufacturer of precision writing instruments. Before the speech, the firm's marketing vice president, Ted Wheelock, shared his hopes for the evening's festivities. The sales staff was mired in a slump. Wheelock felt Lasorda, motivator extraordinaire, could "help us take things to the next level."
I was spellbound by Lasorda's presentation, but not for the reasons you might think. Lasorda's $500-a-minute spiel touched on nothing specific to Staedtler's business. He could have been talking about pens; he could have been talking about peanut butter. His advice ranged from the merely banal ("There are people who make things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened") to the simpleminded ("You gotta want it"), and even included nonsense of Yogi Berra proportions ("The thing you notice about losers is, they don't win"). For his piece de resistance, Lasorda trotted out the tale of how a hobbled Kirk Gibson, through sheer grit, blasted a pinch-hit game-winning home run for the Dodgers in the 1988 World Series. "Kirk just wasn't going to be beaten that day!" thundered Lasorda, as if to imply that losing pitcher Dennis Eckersley of the Oakland A's had come to the ballpark not especially caring whether he cost his team the Series.
What, then, was so fascinating? The reaction. At the end of his talk, Lasorda was applauded and backslapped as if he'd just delivered the Sermon on the Mount. A joyous Wheelock opined that he'd gotten his money's worth—and then some. "Already?" I asked. "How do you know?" He answered by way of a broad gesture at the smiling faces and general vigor that still simmered in the room as Lasorda made his exit. "The guys are stoked," he said.
Some months later, I called Wheelock to find out how things were going. The slump continued.
Today there's no sating corporate America's appetite for the lessons and putative logic of sportsthink.
"Nothing can suppress our compulsion for moving the locker room into the meeting room," says corporate communications theorist John K. MacKenzie. Between 1991 and 2002, annual U.S. corporate training budgets grew from $43.2 billion to $66 billion. Though the portion of that total given over to sports-influenced protocols is hard to pin down, the sum clearly runs to 10 figures. The domestic banquet circuit alone is a roughly $500 million annual enterprise, and Lasorda and his ilk pocket fees that range from $5,000 into the high six figures. Companies spend additional billions on "after-action"—the books, videos, CDs, workshop tutorials, and other ancillary materials designed, says MacKenzie, to create "a bright shining world where never is heard a discouraging word and everybody is a winner all the time."
In one sense, sportsthink has come a long way since my evening with Tommy Lasorda. He represented the movement's first wave, which was all about celebrity and charisma—a McLuhanesque affair wherein the man was the message, even when the man had no message. (The biggest draw was once O.J. Simpson, who preached to standing-room-only crowds despite diction so poor that he could barely be understood.) During the 1990s, the sportsthink phenomenon made cottage industries of just about everyone who'd ever achieved anything on a gridiron, court, rink or ball diamond.
But something else has happened during this decade: Today corporate leaders expect employees not merely to applaud the message and take inspiration from it, but to actually live it. Though household names like Lasorda are still the most recognizable part of the business, the juggernaut is piloted by a host of noncelebrity consultants. These variously credentialed business advisers work with corporate HR offices for weeks or months to inculcate a philosophical message that they believe will change the fabric of a company.
Consider the case of Boise Cascade Office Products (BCOP), a significant part of the $7 billion Boise Cascade empire. The company has enthusiastically adopted the metaphors and structures of professional sports. BCOP uses a chart of a football field to depict its progress toward its annual quota (the "goal line") for sales. It teaches new sales recruits to use sports imagery ("Think of yourself on the 20-yard line, about to kick the game-winning field goal!") and draw sales plans from NFL playbooks, sometimes complete with X's and O's. Members of a major-account team might be assigned the respective functions of quarterback, receiver and offensive lineman, each function correlated to a customer service equivalent. Administrative support personnel are urged to view themselves as assistant coaches.
These tactics have transformed sportsthink from a feel-good exercise into a much more aggressive motivational tool—one with potentially serious side effects. Sportsthink demands results it cannot deliver and teaches people to look at their jobs, if not the world itself, through an overly simplistic, ultracompetitive lens. Life becomes an EST-ian morality play in which winners win because of good character and losers lose because of a weakness of spirit. "Most of these regimens are a mile wide and an inch deep," says Jay Kurtz, president of KappaWest, a leading management-consulting firm. Curing an ailing company requires making tough decisions and bringing about tedious changes, like completely revamping the corporate reporting structure or gutting an underperforming unit. "Very few of [these programs] ever get down to the really gutsy things people have to do within a company to bring about meaningful change."
Tags:
corporate america,
dennis eckersley,
dodgers,
festivities,
kirk gibson,
manager tommy,
motivation,
motivator,
pep-talk,
piece de resistance,
sales staff,
sermon on the mount,
sheer grit,
smiling faces,
sportsthink,
staedtler inc,
success,
tommy lasorda,
vigor,
wheelock,
work,
writing instruments,
yogi berra
