"Blocking and tackling"--the mother of all sports metaphors

From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary:

block verb - 1e: to interfere usually legitimately with (as an opponent) in various games or sports

tackle verb - 2 a: to seize, take hold of, or grapple with especially with the intention of stopping or subduing b: to seize and throw down or stop (an opposing player with the ball) in football.

Long-time readers of this blog will recognize my affinity with sports analogies and metaphors. So, recently, during the summer lull, I embarked upon a non-scientific study of the frequency of certain sports metaphors in business writing. And one popped up far more often than any other: "blocking and tackling."

For those unacquainted with American football, blocking and tackling are two of the most basic skills of the game--necessary (but not sufficient) ingredients for winning. Teams that can't block or tackle are doomed. For executives, blocking and tackling represent work that's not glamorous but is important.

Here are some examples:

WSJ.com Marketbeat What’ll it take to fix Yahoo isn’t a mystery, and isn’t a magic bullet, Henry Blodget writes at Silicon Alley Insider. “It’s just blocking and tackling. And it will take time.”

Innosight blog Burberry has spent more than $100 million to improve its ability to ensure that the right products get to the right stores at the right time. These challenges of course require a fair amount of blocking and tackling, but there's also ample room for fresh, innovative thinking.

NeuStar Q2 2008 Earnings conference call (COO Lisa Hook speaking): However, I asked to be on this call as a six month check-in, to assure that I am focused on delivering the basic, blocking and tackling necessary to meet our targets for growth and profitability.

This phrase was a recurring theme in executives' earnings calls (here, here and here, for example). Of course, given the recent news in the financial markets, perhaps there was better blocking and tackling they could have done.

Other metaphors I looked for that were much rarer: "home run," "unforced error" (which was popular in political writing), "icing the puck," "letting off the hook."

Did I miss any? What favorite sports metaphors do you have?

Related post:
Welcome to Sports Analogy week

Tags:
finance, sports, metaphor, management, leadership

Super Bowl Stories

People who aren't football fans tune into the Super Bowl to watch the advertisements. You've probably seen them, and read about them, already. The talking stain, Shaquille O'Neal as a race jockey, and so forth.

I was fascinated by another ad, part of a fascinating project by the National Football League which gathered stories from over 200 NFL players, and had fans vote on their favorites. The winner was made into a 60-second film, broadcast during the Super Bowl. It's a narrated story, partially dramatized, about an NFL player who meets a large man working at the grocery store. He convinces the man to try out for the college football team. You'll have to watch the video for the rest of the story.



The final product is excellent. But it's also interesting to view the original story, told one-on-one by the Houston Texans' Ephraim Salaam, and see how it changed in the more polished retelling. I love the final ad, but I think I like the original story even better.

storytelling, narrative, marketing, advertising, football, Super Bowl, sports

Sports sponsorships--perhaps not a waste of money

Sponsoring sporting events or teams has always to me seemed more of a CEO ego trip than a serious marketing program. When my wife's old company, Alltel, rented a corporate hospitality box at the BellSouth Classic golf tournament in Atlanta, they had to recruit company spouses (like me and my friend Steve) to fill box space on the weekdays. Great for me and Steve, but great for Alltel? Didn't seem so.

In the September Harvard Business Review, Professors Stephen A. Greyser (Harvard Business School emeritus) and Francis Farrelly of Monash University in Australia argue that sponsoring sporting events has a distinct value for internal marketing--that is, building company identity and culture and enhancing morale (free link). Farrelly and Greyser write:

The French banks BNP and Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (Paribas) used sponsorship of the French Tennis Federation as a unifying element in employee communications to promote acceptance of their postmerger identity and to describe the new company’s future direction. Indeed, the logo and livery of the merged bank were launched primarily through the association with tennis; tennis merchandise and posters of tennis events were distributed widely through the combined network of branches. Moreover, rather than sponsoring just the French Open at Roland Garros, the new organization, operating as BNP Paribas, worked with the tennis federation to develop other events, including a masters competition, that would create further opportunities to engage with staff members around the sponsorship throughout the year. The resulting media exposure and the sponsorship’s internal presence inspired many employees to embrace the new identity.

These stories sound entirely plausible; yet I wonder whether there's any measurement of the value of these investments. I'm skeptical that cold, rational evaluation would demonstrate that large sponsorship investments pay off. Marketers, if you have that data, I'd like to see it.

Giving away logoed merchandise reminds me of another story from the Alltel days (I worked there once, too). Each time morale seemed to slip a little, which was more than a few times, we would arrive in the morning to find a piece of clothing decorated with the Alltel logo on our chairs. I don't know if it helped morale, but I didn't have to buy a polo shirt for quite a while.

(Photo: Manchester United players by AtilaTheHun via Flickr Creative Commons. AIG pays more than $20MM per year to get its logo on Manchester United's jerseys.)

marketing sports sponsorship morale communication Harvard Business Review

Sports Analogy week, day 5: shape your strategies to your talent

Here's a rule of thumb about the difference between coaching college sports and pro sports. Successful college coaches bring players in and ask them to conform to a system. Successful pro coaches adapt their systems to the talents of their teams.

This adage is most true in basketball. To the casual observer, Mike Krzyzewski's Duke team looks the same from year to year, no matter who's on the floor. Pat Riley, by contrast, has won with three markedly different approaches: the Showtime Lakers of the 1980's, the slow, defense-oriented Knicks in the 1990's and the Dwayne-Wade-led Miami Heat in 2006.

Riley adapted how he coached to the players he had available. Once he had determined an identity for the team, he filled in with complementary players who fit that identity (e.g., Lakers, Mychal Thompson; Knicks, Anthony Mason; Heat, Gary Payton).

In managing a group in business, the temptation is to be like Krzyzewski. After all, it's easier for a group of ten to adapt to one manager than for a manager to adapt to ten individuals, right? But the truth is, unless you're working in a process business where tasks are routinized and uniformity and consistency are the main goals, it's better to be Pat Riley.

Value in the future will be more determined by how well individual projects are done, not the efficiency of ongoing processes. (See this link for some background on that thought.) X-Teams use the strengths of the individual team members to achieve results, and rely on their creativity and engagement.

In other words, they're more like the Lakers than the Blue Devils.

sports basketball leadership management teamwork

Sports Analogy Week, Day 4: Finishing

A basketball player is said to be a "finisher" if he/she reliably scores two points or gets fouled when going to the basket.

To define this term by counter-example, let me present Charles Smith. From Bridgeport, Connecticut, he played college basketball at Pittsburgh and was chosen third in the 1988 NBA Draft. Smith was tall and a good rebounder. But he was an awful finisher. When he played for my team, the Knicks, there were countless times when Smith found himself under the basket with the ball in his hands, and it seemed as if someone would block his shot 75% of the time. His Wikipedia entry states:

As a member of the Knicks, Smith is infamous for missing four consecutive shots directly under the basket as he attempted to tie Game 5 of the 1993 Eastern Conference Finals against the Chicago Bulls. After taking a 2-0 lead in the series, the Knicks lost Games 3 and 4 in Chicago. With a chance to take a 3-2 series lead, Smith's attempts were hampered by Michael Jordan, Horace Grant, and Scottie Pippen in the final seconds, becoming one of the most notorious moments in Knicks history.

Charles Smith just couldn't finish. By contrast, Tony Parker of the San Antonio Spurs is a tiny guy by NBA standards, yet he finds a way to get the ball into the basket from in close despite the tall trees around him. Tony Parker is a finisher.

Finishing is just as important in business as on the basketball court. Many, many people are good at the start of a project, when everything is just words on the white board and nothing is at stake. Much harder is the end of a project, when people are tired, customers cranky, flaws apparent, and yet, somehow, certain people find the fortitude to see the project through to the end.

So, ask yourself. At work, are you Tony Parker? Or are you Charles Smith?

(Photo: Tony Parker finishing, by Half Crazy Girl via flickr creative commons)

sports basketball project management organizational behavior leadership

Sports Analogy Week Day 3 - to excel, you need deliberate practice

Becoming an expert is the subject of an article in the July-August Harvard Business Review by Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, Michael Prietula of Emory University and Edward Cokely of the Max Planck Institute (link, first page free). According to the authors, research shows that expertise is developed, not innate. Write Ericsson et al,

The journey to truly superior performance is neither for the faint of heart nor for the impatient. The development of genuine expertise requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest, often painful self-assessment. There are no shortcuts. It will take you at least a decade to achieve expertise, and you will need to invest that time wisely, by engaging in “deliberate” practice—practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort.

This reminded me of Larry Bird. [By the way, being a Knicks fan, I hated Bird. But you had to respect him.] I recall a story that midway in his Celtic career, Bird, already an MVP, spent an entire summer playing left-handed, as a way to develop his skills using his weaker hand. By the time the season started, Bird was able to score around the basket easily with his left or right hand.

How much time does such practice take? Less than you'd think--though more time than many businesspeople feel they have to spare. The authors write:

...Most expert teachers and scientists set aside only a couple of hours a day, typically in the morning, for their most demanding mental activities, such as writing about new ideas. While this may seem like a relatively small investment, it is two hours a day more than most executives and managers devote to building their skills, since the majority of their time is consumed by meetings and day-to-day concerns.

Which is a chilling thought. We don't spend enough time working on things we don't know or can't do, and we're not really improving.

(Photo: a Larry Bird toy, shooting right-handed, from sgursozlu via stock.xchng)

sports basketball expertise learning development Harvard Business Review

Sports Analogy week day 2: no mulligans

I played golf with my brother-in-law a few years ago. He hadn't played much and was struggling. But no matter where his drive went, or where he found his ball, he would not take a mulligan or improve his lie. "Go ahead and move the ball," I told him. "Why suffer?"

"No thanks," was his reply. And he hacked the ball back into the fairway.

That round made a big impression on me. For one thing, I was a poor-to-fair golfer and I'd take mulligans from time to time, or take a favorable drop, or the like. But what my brother-in-law taught me that day was that I would never know precisely how well I was doing at golf if I didn't follow the rules.

And if I didn't know how well I was doing, it would be hard to improve. I had to confront the brutal facts (as stated in "Good to Great"--wait, didn't I discredit this book just last week??) before I could move forward.

I tried to take that lesson into my business life as well. How were things going, really? Was I using excuses to mask weaknesses I myself needed to address?

In short, to be great at business you can't take mulligans. You've got to face reality and try to improve.

It was a very valuable day on the golf course. After I cut down on the mulligans and played the ball where it lay, my scores, predictably, got worse. Over time they've come down. And, best of all, they're real.

(Photo: "Tee Time 3" from Garrison Photography via stock.xchng--note: NOT my brother-in-law)

leadership sports golf measurement improvement

Welcome to Sports Analogy Week

I'm a lifelong sports fan, and as a result can't help but connect sports to business. This drove my old colleague Roberta crazy. "Why do you keep using sports analogies?" she told me repeatedly. "Don't you realize some people don't care about sports?"

So, in honor of everyone else--those who do care about sports--a week of posts on how sports and business relate. (Roberta, I look forward to you tuning back in next Monday.)

For today, a remembrance of the late great Bill Walsh, coach of the San Francisco 49ers during their glory years. What always impressed me about his teams was how prepared they were for pressure situations. For example, being down and needing a touchdown to win in the last few minutes of the game (which played itself out in Super Bowl 23 against the Bengals).

Why did his teams execute so coolly in such pressurized moments? Because they had practiced precisely that scenario, many times before. It was just a matter of executing the plays they already knew, in the sequence they were ready for. The following is from the recent obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle:

"We didn't beat guys up," he said in an interview in Football Digest. He preferred to save the contact for the game and concentrate instead on preparing for every situation that might come up in a game.

"The format of practice and contingency planning -- those, to me, are the biggest contributions that I've made to the game," he said.

Before Walsh, I didn't view preparation in business very highly (wiser people than I did, of course). In fact, I liked exercising my improvisatory skills a lot. But in thinking about Walsh's teams, and how they performed, I learned that these were skills--preparing before meetings, considering contingencies and rehearsing how to respond--I very much needed to learn.

(Photo of Penn State football by bilim via stock.xchng)

leadership sports football preparation contingency planning

PGA Tour has lost its sense...of branding

Sports marketing has been careening toward the cliff of excess for some time now (the wall-to-wall corporate sponsorship depicted in "Talladega Nights" was more verisimilitude than parody). But the recent revolving door of sponsor-named events in the US PGA golf tour is seriously damaging the history and heritage of US professional golf.

The latest example is something called the PODS Championship, held this past weekend in Florida. (PODS stands for Portable On-Demand Storage, in the form of a shipping container that this company drops in your front yard for you to fill with stuff, where it sits till your house project is done, much to the delight of your neighbors.)

The PODS Championship used to be the Chrysler Championship, and was held in the fall, not in early March. It's always been in the Tampa area, but you wouldn't know that from any of the communication surrounding the event. In fact, for all I knew (and I'm a golf fan!), this was a brand-spanking new event.

I could have said the same thing about the Wachovia Championship, the Fry's Electronics Open, the Buick Classic, the Buick Open or the Buick Invitational, not to mention the late, great 84 Lumber Classic. (Some of these were events with history, and some were new. See if you can guess which!)

What ever happened to the Westchester Classic, the Western Open, or the Firestone Tournament of Champions? At least AT&T was smart enough to retain part of the historical name of its tournament (the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am).

Exclusive naming rights bring tens of millions of dollars yearly to the PGA Tour, helping purses to grow tenfold between 1986 and 2006, according to GolfWorld. But at some point they'll be ruing the day the good old Greater Hartford Open became the Travelers.

branding, marketing, sponsorship, sports