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.
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Does school-based sports, with a 100-year-old history, have a 50 or even 15 year future in schools and society?
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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.
Representative Voices
April 4, 2017
The Michigan High School Athletic Association is governed by a Representative Council of 18 members and a designee of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. It is important that this representative body actually be representative of the group it serves.
Of the 18 regular members of the Representative Council,
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16 have served as high school athletic directors, with an average tenure of 16.5 years. Eight have also served as junior high/middle school athletic directors, with an average tenure of 11.7 years.
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11 have served as high school assistant principals, averaging 6.2 years.
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5 have served as high school principals, averaging 6.4 years.
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3 have served as junior high/middle school principals, averaging 11.7 years.
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3 have served as superintendents or assistant superintendents, averaging 4.7 years.
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17 of the 18 have served as high school coaches, with an average tenure of 6.9 years. Seven have also served as middle school coaches, with an average tenure of 7.6 years.
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11 have been MHSAA registered officials. The average tenure has been 13.1 years, in an average of 2.1 sports.
To assure representation of both large and small schools in all parts of the state, the MHSAA Constitution requires that four Council members be elected from the Class A and B schools in four different geographic regions, and four be elected from Class C and D schools from those four geographic sections.
Five other Council members are elected by statewide votes, with two of those specifically designated persons serving junior high/middle schools, and one representing private and parochial schools. The public schools within the city of Detroit also have a representative.
To assure representation from females and minorities that might not occur through the election process, the MHSAA Constitution requires that the Council examine its makeup after each election and appoint up to a maximum of four persons at any one time to help address those deficiencies. The Council sometimes uses this appointment process to bring better representation to a part of the state that is underrepresented through the election process.
It goes almost without saying that nearly all of the Council members participated in competitive school sports and are the parents of participants in interscholastic athletics.
All in all, it’s a team with breadth and depth that touches most of the constituent bases of high school sports in Michigan.