The NBA, where your team leader hates your chances

Tonight is like Christmas, my birthday, and the last day of school all rolled into one - the start of the 2010-2011 NBA season!

For me, it means 50 or so nights to be disappointed by the New York Knicks, the chance to watch LeBron and his talents with the Miami Heat pretty much every other night, and hopefully more great and pithy leadership lessons from Jeff Van Gundy.

At the start of the year most NBA teams have some sense of excitement, (real or fake), and express optimism (at least publicly) about their chances for a successful upcoming season. You know, the whole 'hope springs eternal' bit.  And why not?  Every team has at least a few star quality players, and even the 9th and 10th guy on the bench is a pretty talented player as well.

So prior to the start of the campaign, confidence is pretty much the order of the day, and standard cliches abound. 'If we stay healthy and stick to our strengths, we can contend', or 'If we all concentrate on our roles and share the ball, we will be right there at the end', are mostly what you hear from the top players and team leaders before opening night.  

Given that, it was pretty surprising to see the quotes attributed to two-time NBA league MVP Steve Nash about his team, the Phoenix Suns, and their prospects for the coming season. Nash has been reported to have said (variously) that the team has "a long ways to go", is really a "work in progress". and finally, "to be honest, if I was outside this picture, and a betting man, I would probably pick us to be outside the playoffs".

So your team's best player, and leader, goes public with his expressions of doubt about the team's chances for a successful season.  Probably not going to do too much to fire up the fan base, or even inspire the rest of the players to (over) achieve.  It is pretty common for sports teams to try and adopt an 'no one believes in us' or 'it is us up against the world' strategy to generate and sustain motivation, but that generally only works when the 'them' are the media, the other teams in the league, or even directed against former players and coaches that have departed.

Usually 'it's us against them' falls down when the 'them' is one of your own, and worse still, your leader.

What's your take - does the team leader need to 'fake it', at least publicly?

Go Knicks!

Email and Easter Eggs

Chances are many of the emails you spend all day cranking out to your colleagues take about 1/10th of the time to actually scan read as they do to for you to compose.  By the time they get to paragraph three,(assuming they made it that far),  most recipients have tuned out, distracted by the three new messages that just popped into their inbox, a phone call, a text message from their kid, or, if they are really on the cutting edge, a stray Tweet or Direct Message.

If there is something in the message that is really, truly, important you can't bury 175 words in. Hardly anyone is paying attention that far down, trust me.  Don't think this applies to you? Test it out sometime.  Draw up another one of your typical 385 word soliloquies on the budget planning process, or next year's performance management initiatives, or whatever is consuming your thoughts today.  But in the third or fourth paragraph, slide in the  equivalent of an 'Easter Egg', a concept taken from video games where game players can unlock secret or extra functionality by discovering a hidden code, message, or other undocumented feature. Unlocking the ‘egg’ grants the player more abilities, or access to normally hidden levels for game play.

Except you shouldn't have to make your 'egg' all the secret, or hard to spot.  Try it. First thing in the morning send out your own ‘Easter Egg’ a little something like this:

Lead with 200 words of drivel importance then slip this in ... 'So as we continue in assessing the most critical functional skills of the organization's talent, let's tie up any loose ends in our thinking by meeting at Noon for a long lunch at (insert name of local pub here), where I will buy lunch and beverages for all in attendance.  At the lunch we will continue to examine the cross-organizational implications and synergies of our holistic approach to leadership and increased employee engagement, blah, blah, blah. Thanks very much, etc.

Then don’t send another message about the lunch invitation, try to avoid any direct conversation about the plan, and don’t respond to any calls or emails for the rest of the morning.  In fact, sneak out of your office at about 11:15 or so, (or whatever time is sufficiently early to avoid being seen as ‘going to lunch’) and head over to the pub.  Grab a table large enough for at least a few of the invitees to join you, and wait.

Assuming you are reasonably well-liked (at least enough to accept a free lunch from), one of three things will result:

One - No one, or maybe a token colleague shows up - time to really re-think your communication style because whatever you are doing, it’s not working.

Two -  A small group (3 or 4) turn up.  Not bad, but not great either.  Here’s where you have to really evaluate the composition of the ones that turned up. If it the three young guys that spend most of their time talking about fantasy football and happy hours, you can be pretty confident the only message that got though was ‘free beer’.

Three - The majority of email recipients do actually show up for lunch.  Either you have a really attentive team, or you maybe have one person that found the ‘egg’ and shared it with the group. Either way though, you can feel good that the message did get across, even if it was buried in the blather.

The thing is most of us probably think we are pretty effective communicators.  We might even ask our peers, friends, and colleagues to give us feedback and help us improve.  But, especially if you are the boss, people lie.  A better way to see how your communication stacks up is to put it to the test once in a while.

So where is lunch again?

PBR, Irony, and Duct Tape

If you are sort of old like me, and not all that cool, you might not know that amongst wide swaths of the young, hipster crowd that Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) beer has become a popular and trendy beverage of choice.

Part of the reason for PBR's popularity with that scene is it's relative value; I think a 12-pack of PBR can be had for a reasonable $7.00 or $8.00 in most parts of the country.  The other explanation for the brand's recent success with the cool kids is less about value and more about image; by drinking PBR, a brew that is more or less bland, nondescript, and 'old',  the hipsters are making a kind of statement. They are sending a message that they simply don't care about what the beer they choose says about them, and going further, if they do choose to drink cheap, mass-produced beer that they choose to consciously and conspicuously shun the mass-market, mass-advertised, and more obvious choices like Budweiser or Coors for a more 'indie' choice in PBR. 

In a way it is the ironic choice.  To try and rebel against the incessant marketing messages from the major brands, the hipsters choose to go even more down market, all the way down to PBR.  When was the last time you can recall seeing a PBR commercial on the Super Bowl, or for that matter, any kind of PBR advertising at all?  And no, the aging 1960s era posters at the local bowling alley don't count. At the end of the day, the folks that make and sell PBR probably don't completely understand this newfound popularity, but they know that for the moment anyway, and for the first time in maybe 40 years, the PBR brand has some relevance, some cachet even.  

My Dad still lives in New Jersey, in the house I grew up in.  His neighbor and friend that lives across the street is named Phil, and for most of my childhood Phil worked in a brewery helping to make PBR beer. As kids, we never thought Phil was all that hip or cool. To us, he was an old guy, he wore a workshirt with the PBR logo that we, in our ignorant and narrow view of the world, thought was low-class.  He used duct tape to hold the muffler assembly on his aging Buick, an improvised repair that we laughed at, with our childish lack of awareness of the realities and problems that mortgages, insurance, and medical bills put on an unskilled worker in a brewery.

Phil came home from work every day and took his son, Phil Jr., out for a walk.  Phil Jr. was just a year or two younger than me, but I never had a relationship with him. Sadly, he was a victim of Cerebral Palsy. He could not walk, could hardly communicate, and could not see. Phil would take Phil Jr. out, stand behind him and hold him up, and proceed to try and walk him up and down the street, the entire time having what to us seemed like a one-sided conversation with his son. To Phil these were probably the most precious few moments of the day.  Phil took these walks with this son every day for years.

As I think back on it, I wonder if Phil secretly hoped that these walks with his son, where he essentially was carrying him along, would somehow, someway be the catalyst that would enable Phil Jr. to walk on his own one day.  Eventually the combination of Phil Jr. growing too tall and heavy, and Phil getting older and weaker put an end to these daily supported walks.  Phil Jr's condition never really improved, and at some point after I had gone off to college and moved away, he was placed in an assisted living facility.

Around that same time the fortunes of PBR beer were clearly on the decline, and the brewery where Phil had worked for 20-odd years was closed. After that Phil bounced around in a series of jobs - maintenance worker, janitor, maybe even night security guard, until he finally was able to retire a few years ago.  

I saw Phil earlier this year when my Dad was hospitalized, and he came to pay a visit.  He looked tired, seemed a little bit confused, but for someone that has endured a long and often emotionally painful life I suppose was holding up as well as can be expected.  It was good to see him.

I wanted to tell him about the resurgence of the PBR brand, about how in the last few years it has suddenly become hip to drink PBR, but after a few minutes I realized that he would not have really understood or appreciated or even cared. 

And come to think of it, I am glad I didn't try and tell the story to Phil.  When most people see the PBR label today, they think of the Brooklyn hipsters looking and acting so much cooler that the rest of us. Shallow, transitory, and meaningless.

When I see the PBR label, I think of Phil, in his workshirt, carrying his son up and down the street.

Extending Your Reach

Yesterday enterprise collaboration vendor Socialcast announced availability of a new set of tools and capabilities called 'Reach', that enable easy integration of the Socialcast activity stream and microblogging platform to traditional enterprise systems like CRM, ERP, Sharepoint; and even newer tools such as wikis and blogs.

To appreciate why this is important let's take a step back to look at enterprise microblogging in general, and Socialcast in particular. Internal organizational microblogging, often referred to as 'Twitter for the Enterprise', has been around for some time.  Several vendors offer varied solutions in the space, the most notable and popular is probably Yammer, a service that has also recently improved and expanded its offerings.  Enterprise micoblogging has always offered important benefits and features for organizations, especially when compared to Twitter. 

Chief among these features are the ability to create secure, company-only networks, support for internal group formation, better functionality for sharing files and images, and less restriction (or no restriction at all), on the length of status updates beyond the Twitter-standard 140 characters. While the internal microblogging solutions have evolved, and continued to improve, they have to this point been somewhat limited in their attractiveness in many organizations due to their stand-alone deployment and their position as yet another enterprise system to be used, maintained, and monitored.  

Much like Twitter sort of 'exists' on its own, mostly separate from other applications and software services that people use for their work, enterprise microblogging has stood separate as well, and for many use cases or valuable forms of collaboration between and among company colleagues this has proven if not an absolute barrier, certainly as a constraint to more widespread organizational deployment.

Activity stream embedded on a wiki page

Socialcast has been in the enterprise collaboration space for a few years, and their microblogging and  'enterprise activity stream' solution is flexible (allowing integration of content from external networks like Twitter or RSS feeds), and easy to use and deploy.  Deployment options both on-premise or hosted make the solution more broadly appealing and able to meet varying IT organizations requirements.

The newest addition to the solution, Socialcast Reach,  takes an important step in addressing the isolation issue, by providing the capability to embed and extend the collaboration platform and activity stream directly to the classic enterprise applications where employees carry out their work.  By simply inserting some simply code, the Socialcast collaboration platform is instantly embedded inside the ERP, CRM, or the company wiki.  So when a sales rep has a question about price or product availability when updating a customer account in the CRM, they can ask a question in an embedded Socialcast collaboration widget, to which others in the company can respond from wherever they happen to be, in the CRM as well, in the Socialcast application, on their mobile device, or anywhere else that the platform has been extended.

In addition to the familiar microblogging activity stream paradigm, Reach also offers support for two other types of collaborative engagement. 'Discussions' -  focused discussions around key resources within your business that allows employees to engage in specific conversations related to customers, projects and operational metrics; and 'Recommendations' -  a way for a user to “recommend” via a button on any resource in the enterprise, and for that recommendation to be inserted into the Socialcast platform, surfacing that person’s recommendation for the enterprise.

If you have only experienced microblogging via Twitter, or even if you have tried an enterprise microblogging solution, this ability to weave and embed the collaboration backbone more deeply within the accepted and expected existing systems and workflows in the organization may be the most important development yet in actually driving increased levels of user adoption and accruing value from more systemic collaboration. 

For companies considering an enterprise microblogging or collaboration platform, Reach gives you another reason to check out Socialcast.  Driving richer and deeper collaboration inside the enterprise and ingrained as part of the organization's work practices is likely an important issue and concern in most enterprises today.  Talking about increased collaboration won't make it so, but deploying isolated tools and technologies might not either, and with 'Reach' Socialcast has created what might be the first collaboration solution that really understands that issue. 

The things we carry with us

Last week I caught the latest installment in ESPN's consistently excellent '30 For 30' series of documentaries, a film called 'Once Brothers', which chronicles the saga of the great Yugoslavian National Basketball team of the late 1980's and early 1990's through images, recollections, and first person accounts.

The story centers around the friendship of the two best players on the team, Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic, their time as national team members, their journey to America and the NBA, and ultimately their estrangement as war in their homeland (Divac is Serbian while Petrovic was from Croatia), tears apart their country, their team, their friendship, and their lives. 

Quick re-set of the major developments in the story:

1988 - Yugoslavia (essentially composed of Republics of Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia), and led by Divac and Petrovic, wins Olympic Silver Medal

1989 - Divac and Petrovic both join the NBA, Divac to the Los Angeles Lakers, and Petrovic to the Portland Trail Blazers. The comrades talk almost daily, and support each other as brothers would.

1990 - Yugoslavia wins Gold Medal in World Basketball Championships, defeating the USA and Soviet Union.

1991 - Petrovic traded to the New Jersey Nets, where he is afforded increased playing time and emerges as a star in the league

1991 - Widespread civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia. Croatia and Serbia are now at war (it was actually way more complex than that).  Armed conflict would last until 1995.  

1992 - Yugoslavian team disbands, Divac and Petrovic become estranged, as the conflict between their countries sours their relationship.

1992 - United States 'Dream Team' with Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson wins Olympic Basketball Gold Medal. The USA assembled this team of professionals in large measure due to the defeat at the hands of Yugoslavia in 1990.

1993 - Petrovic tragically killed in a car accident in Germany. He had just completed his finest season in the NBA, averaging 22 points per game for the New Jersey Nets

2004 - Divac retires after 15 years in the NBA

Divac serves as the film's narrator and central figure, and it is his quest to attempt to understand, and eventually find peace with his memory of the war, with Petrovic's tragic death, and the lingering questions of 'What might have been' are what drives the film and what gives it its emotional base.

It is of course a sad and tragic story.  The war was lengthy, costly, and devastating.  The lives and families of millions of people forever changed.  Petrovic dying at 28 in a car accident, just as he had emerged as a star in the NBA was such a waste. Divac, who we learn has carried with him for almost twenty years the pain, guilt, and unresolved questions of his friendship with Petrovic, never to find closure since Petrovic dies before the war ends, denying the former teammates, the former brothers any chance to reconcile the past.

Who cares right?  I mean, what does it matter about a stupid basketball team in the context of a bloody, brutal war?  Does it really matter if a united Yugoslavian team might have given the Dream Team a scare in 1992?

It doesn't I suppose.

But what is interesting to me in the story is Divac himself.  He carries on through war in his homeland (and we see in the film that Divac considered himself as a representative of Yugoslavia, and not Serbia), through the death of his best friend, and through the adjustment to a new country and culture under the intense spotlight of professional sports.  For more that 10 years after Petrovic's death he continues to perform at a high level.

For 10 years he showed up to work carrying the memory of war, and loss, and his dead friend, and of his country that would be forever changed. And I won't let you get away with, 'He was being paid millions of dollars to play, of course he continued to show up'. 

The money could never bring back Petrovic. Could never bring back any of the victims of the war. Could never heal the survivors facing their own painful memories. He showed up. He played. He endured. And for years I watched Divac not knowing any of this, ignorant of the baggage he must of had to carry with him on the court each night. 

The people we work with, work for, and each of us ourselves - we are all carrying something with us when we walk in the office today.  Sadness, pain, maybe even tragedy along for the ride.  Divac played through all that, but he never forgot any of it.

I hope we can be kind to those who perhaps are not as strong as him.

Note : 'Once Brothers' will re-air on Wednesday October 20 at 9:30PM on ESPN. Watch, set your TIVO, but don't miss it. The trailer for the film is below (email subscribers click through).