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.
The National Anthem
November 1, 2016
The National Anthem has been in the news this fall ... across the nation when players have demonstrated discontent during its playing at sporting events ... in Michigan over administrators' decisions about how frequently it was played when multiple sporting events were at the same venue on the same day or night.
Frankly, my biggest complaint is not about peaceful demonstrations of deeply felt feelings. And my complaint is not about game management determinations to have the National Anthem played or performed just once when there is a JV and varsity double-header at a site.
In fact, I welcome those debates, because at least it causes people to think. For my biggest complaint for many years has been the lack of thought that goes into most occasions when the National Anthem is a part of sporting events. How casual we often are. The National Anthem is so frequent and routine at most high school events that, sometimes, spectators barely notice.
I don't mind that most spectators don't sing the National Anthem – it's an almost un-singable song. And the words – glorifying war – are hardly what I'd like recited at sporting events, which too often are stupidly equated with war.
What I do mind is forgetfulness, both of the sacrifices that have secured this free country and of the toleration for freedom of expression that our secured freedom protects.