2011 Rewind - My Favorite Sports Post of the Year

Note: This week I am taking a look back on some of the 2011 posts that were either popular, interesting, (at least to me), or that might warrant a re-visit for some reason before the year is officially in the books. And also after about 200 or so posts this year, I am more or less tapped out of original ideas and want to recharge a bit. So that said, I hope you enjoy this little look back at 2011 here on my tiny corner of the internets.

Sure I like to write about sports. Maybe, just maybe a little too much, (debatable). Of all the sports-themed posts on the blog in 2011, this one from May, a look at talent assessment methodologies and titled 'Bench Pressing and Basketball' was my favorite.

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With the National Basketball Association player draft fast approaching, fans, observers, and pundits alike love to speculate and predict the player draft order, and imagine the glorious future for their favorite team once this years' version of young Timmy 'The Flint Assasin' Sackett, or some other such prospect joins the squad.

Readers of this site, along with my pieces on Fistful of Talent, know that sports, and in particular how the talent evaluation and assessment processes that professional sports teams undertake as they consider which players to draft, recruit as free agents, trade, and compensate; make for some compelling stories and often illuminate applicable lessons for those of us with concerned with more mundane but similar workplace conundrums. None of the 'Sports and HR' parallels are more clearly illustrated than annual player drafts that all the major USA professional sports leagues conduct.

The purpose of these drafts is to help 're-stock' the talent pools in the league with new players, ones that have the capability and potential to raise the overall talent profile of the league and the individual teams. Essentially each season, younger, more talented players (or at least ones judged to have potential to be good players), enter the league while older and/or less skilled/more expensive players exit. It is a kind of a cool, virtuous 'Lion King' style circle of life, but will louder music and more tattoos.

The trick for talent evaluators and people in charge of player personnel decisions in the draft is how to assess the complex combination of a prospect's performance on the court to date (usually in college basketball, but sometimes just high school, or international play), the player's physical attributes, their personality and character, and finally whether or not that elusive 'fit' between style, physical traits, and mental make-up exists between the prospect and the team.

You will often see quotes from NBA or other sports execs talking about players they select as being 'Our kind of player', or 'His style fits how we like to play'. These quotes are as much about cultural and organizational fit as they are about hitting jump shots or ability to rebound the basketball. The rules of the game are the same for every team, but how they go about assembling the team and their philosophies about how to best accomplish the universal goal of winning the championship are all unique.

So in sports, like in most every other line of business, talent assessment and selection is really hard. So NBA teams have come to increase or expand the variables they assess and measure when it comes to the talent evaluation process for potential draftees. One of these variables is the number of times the prospect can successfully bench press 185 lbs, a moderate amount of weight for a well-conditioned athlete, certainly not a power lifter or bodybuilder burden, but also a weight that could present a challenge. The 185 pound bench press is meant to give a generalized assessment of the player's upper body strength, that at least in theory could translate to effectiveness on the court. But bench pressing isn't really basketball, they don't roll out a bench and some barbells in the 4th quarter of a close game. The other advantage to teams in using the bench press test, (and a myriad of other fitness and strength tests they use), is that every prospect takes the same assessments, thereby giving the teams a common data set across the entire talent pool from which to make comparative judgments.

But the data itself offers a team no competitive advantage - every team in the league has access to the same information. The trick is knowing how to interpret the 'measurables' (bench press, vertical jump, etc.), with the 'intangibles', (character, coachability, likeability), and finally a frank assessment of 'Can this guy actually play?'; in order to make the best talent selections. 

But back to the bench press, which is the reason I wrote this piece. Yesterday I noticed a tweet from Chad Ford, one of ESPN's basketball writers and analysts commenting on the bench press test results from a few of this year's current NBA draft prospects.  The tweet is below:

The implication of the tweet is a kind of red flag or warning about those few players unable to successfully bench press 185 pounds. That teams considering drafting these players may pause, and fans of teams that eventually do take these players might need to be concerned that their lack of demonstrable upper body strength (doing something that isn't actually playing basketball), portends poorly for their future performance as NBA players.

It is hard to say for sure if this poor performance on the test will actually hurt these players draft position, it certainly won't help it, but I think the larger point is about data collection in general. Whether it is an NBA team evaluating a power forward, or a software company assessing the background and skills of a candidate for a development job, our abiliity to collect reams of data about background, capability, demonstrable skills, and even mental make up has never been greater. We have access to powerful analytics tools to crunch the data and perhaps eventually to construct detailed and predictive 'success' models.

It could very well be the success on the bench press test does suggest future success on an NBA team. Or failure on the test predicts failure on the court.

But even if we can create those kinds of models, for basketball players or software developers, they will never be fool proof, as people and performance are ultimately likely too unpredictable to ever understand absolutely. We have to be open-minded enough to ignore our own models from time to time.

You may, even if you are not a basketball fan, have heard of a player called Kevin Durant. He is a star player for the Oklahoma City Thunder, has led the league in scoring, led the USA team to the Gold Medal in the World Basketball Championship last summer.

In 2007, when Durant declared himself eligible for the NBA draft, he was unable to bench press 185 a single time. 

And we know how Durant has worked out. 

Sure collect, assess, analyze, correlate, model - it's important. But don't forget, bench pressing is not basketball.

Nothing But Net - Talking NBA on the HR Happy Hour Tonight

This week is really the wind down of 2011 as many of us get ready to celebrate holidays, take some time off from the grind, and generally decompress a little bit before the New Year is upon us and things get cranked up all the way to 11 again. One of the fixtures of the holiday season, certainly here in the USA, are sports - specifically the slate of Christmas Day NBA games that typically feature the Association's leading teams and stars in a nationally televised showcase.

This year, the schedule of Christmas games takes on heightened meaning, as the long protracted labor strife between the league's players and owners was only recently settled, and subsequently delayed the start of the 2011-2012 campaign long enough to make the holiday games the actual start of the new season. 

So since the world of work is winding down, and the world of basketball is just heating up, for the last HR Happy Hour Show of 2011, we are going to do a full-on, nothing at all to do with work, or talent management, or recruiting, NBA preview show. Just the NBA - the labor issues, the short training camps, the player moves, the predictions - everything you need to know to get ready for the new season.

Joining me on the show will be some or all of the crew from 'The 8 Man Rotation' - Kris Dunn, Tim Sackett, Matt Stollak, and Lance Haun, to talk LeBron, Kobe, Dirk, Durant, and more.

You know you love the NBA and what better way to wind down from the workplace and gear up for the holidays and the start of the season by listening to your pals talk NBA on the HR Happy Hour Show tonight.

Here's how you can listen in tonight, starting at 8:00PM ET:

On the show page here. By calling the listener line at 646-378-1086, or on the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

Also, you can follow the backchannel conversation on Twitter - just follow the hashtag #HRHappyHour.

Go Knicks!

Repetition, Creativity, and Short Memories

A series of pretty long flights and flight delays the last few months not only provided some decent blog material for my 'Notes From the Road' series, but also furnished the opportunity to finally read the almost 800-page unofficial oral history of ESPN called 'Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN', by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.

The book's format, and it is definitely not for everyone, has almost no author penned narrative or exposition. Rather the story of ESPN unfolds in a long series of snippets from interviews that the authors conducted with more than 500 people that built, led, worked at, or observed ESPN since its humble beginnings in 1979 to its self-proclaimed position today as the 'Worldwide Leader in Sports.' The tale of ESPN, with plenty of drama, corporate infighting, scandal, really questionable to downright bad behavior, innovative and groundbreaking ideas, and finally to its position today as probably the most powerful single entity in sports, (and the main reason your cable TV bill is so high), is really targeted at the sports junkies among us.  So while I enjoyed the book, I can't really recommend it to anyone other than the sports-obsessed.

But in the 800 pages worth of observations and comments from (mostly), really successful and accomplished executives, broadcasters, and marketers there are quite a number of interesting and kind of instructive pieces of advice that have application in areas beyond sports the presentation of sports on TV. Again, while there are several of these in the book - I will just highlight one, an examination and recommendation on staying fresh, even when the work seems repetitive, and how to continue to bring new ideas to the table when it can be easy to keep trotting out the 'this is the way we've always done it' card.

Here it is, some advice from ESPN Executive Producer Bill Fitts to the line Producers as to what they should do with their written post-mortem show reports after an event had been broadcasted:

"When you guys finish your shows, take that file and throw it out. Do not keep one piece of paper, because next year when we have to come back and do this again, it will force you to rethink everything you did, not just pick up from where you left off and implement the same procedures and production elements that you did last year."

Money. The challenge in a creative field like broadcasting is to continue to push, to keep new ideas flowing, to devise and deliver new ways for the audience to experience the events so that with each viewing, even if if was the 3,459rd basketball game they had seen, maybe something about the show would be new, fresh, innovative. And you can really only make that happen, at least consistently, by letting go of the past, your assumptions, your pre-conceived constraints, and look at the challenge like it was brand new, and anything is possible.

And its good advice for us in the workplace as well. Whether it is annual benefits open enrollment, a new training and development program we are pushing, or a new system we are building - how might the way we deliver be different, (and hopefully better), if we could really let go of the past and start brand new.

Labor Negotiations, Point Guards, and Genius Economists

So I am starting to get a little obsessed with the ongoing progress, or lack thereof, in the National Basketball Association's labor dispute between the owners, (billionaires that mostly didn't get to be billionaires by accident), and the players, (millionaires that also mainly did not get there by accident, unless you consider being 'tall' an accident).Who's that guy? That's not Metta WP.

For months the negotiations have dragged on, and last week the league announced the postponement of the start of team training camps and the cancellation of several early pre-season games. These developments, while not totally unexpected, act to raise the pressure on both sides to reach a settlement quickly, as the start of the NBA regular season, (and the point where players and owners actually start to feel the economic impact of the labor problems), is clearly in jeopardy of being postponed as well. Soon, each week the league and its players fail to come to an agreement means a week of games that will not be played, effecting players, team staffs, arena workers, media and broadcast partners, and all the extended ecosystem of stakeholders in the league. Not to mention me, and how I'll need to find a way to kill every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday night from November until June.

From the ESPN.com piece linked above, here's a short recap of the last set of negotiations between the league officials, and representatives for the player's union: (I've added some descriptors in parentheses for clarity).

(NBA Commissioner David) Stern celebrated his 69th birthday Thursday but didn't appear in a festive mood after meeting for about five hours with leaders from the union. He was joined by Silver, the deputy commissioner, Spurs owner Peter Holt, who heads the labor relations committee, and NBA senior vice president and deputy general counsel Dan Rube. (Los Angeles Lakers Point Guard Derek) Fisher, (Union chief Billy)Hunter, attorney Ron Klempner and economist Kevin Murphy represented the union.

 A description of a classic 'Management v. Union' negotiating meeting, right? High-ranking officials from the league, the Union Chief, the player's rep (Fisher), and of course a couple of lawyers and even an economist tossed in for good measure by the player's side. 

Typical unless you take a closer look at the one, 'sort of out of place but not really because I've never heard of him' Economist, Kevin Murphy.

Because Mr. Murphy is not just an ordinary economist - in fact he might be one of the smartest and most influential economists out there. From Mr. Murphy's Wikipedia page:

In 1997 Murphy was awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association, given once every two years to the most outstanding American economist under the age of forty, and widely considered to be the second most prestigious prize in economics (after the Nobel Prize in Economics). Murphy was cited for his study of the causes of growing income inequality between white-collar and blue-collar workers in the United States and his research linking the growth in income inequality to growth in the demand for skilled labor. His other research has covered such topics as economic growth, income inequality, valuing medical research, rational addiction, and unemployment.

On September 20, 2005, he was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."

So I can imagine the mindset of Commissioner Stern, (no dummy certainly), and the league owners in all this. They have (collectively), more money, more power, more control, and probably think more negotiating leverage in this situation. They usually sit across the table from union officials and player representatives and have to think - 'We're smarter than them.'. It would not be an irrational conclusion. 

But all of a sudden the meeting starts, and in walks the economic genius, Mr. Murphy along with the Union Chief and the Lakers point guard, and I wonder if Stern and the owners did a double take. Did they know who Mr. Murphy is? Did they have any idea about his history and reputation? Did they know they were sitting across a 'not quite but probably pretty soon Nobel prize candidate'?

You want to win your Beer League Friday night softball game? Easy. Bring in a ringer from the local college baseball team and claim he's the new guy in Accounting. 

Want to get an edge at the negotiating table? Drop a 'genius' economist next to your starting point guard.

Eventually a deal will be reached, and the games will be scheduled, and it is hard to know which side will 'win', but for me I'll give the players the halftime lead for their creative approach to stacking their team.

Sharing the Wealth - NBA Style

Yes, ANOTHER sports-related post. 

Cue the groans from the few readers that have not bailed out. I don't blame you. Just give me another shot tomorrow.

This piece isn't REALLY about sports, but rather how an organization's distribution of payroll factors in to contract negotiations, employee movement, and even competitiveness.  As basketball fans are aware, the National Basketball Association, (NBA, or the 'association'), is in the midst of an old-school management vs. worker labor impasse.  Well as 'old-school' as you can get when the put-upon workers average seven-figure salaries, and the owners who are mostly billionaires, sit on franchise values that seemingly rise every year.

But the owners want to further control and restrict the total compensation available to players. They in the past have managed this by negotiating a maximum total percentage of basketball-related revenue that can be paid out to the players in compensation.  The expired labor deal set that figure at 57% of total basketball revenue. Now there are lots of arguments and disputes around the details of the deal, (what exactly constitutes 'basketball revenue' chief among them), and there are more detailed parameters that control how much each team can spend, and even rules around maximum contract values for individual players. 

But while percentage of gross revenue paid out in player compensation is the big issue, for teams and players individual compensation is equally important. How the 'pie' is spread inside the league, amongst superstars, solid contributors, and new talent trying to prove themselves is also a critically important angle here, both for the NBA and likely for your organization as well.

The chart below from a piece on Business Insider shows the relative total allocation of league player payroll across salary levels. For example, if 10 players made $4 million, then $40 million would be dedicated to that salary slot. If total payroll was $1 billion, 4 percent of total payroll would go to $4-million players. The higher the bar, the more total league payroll is expended on all talent at that salary level.

Take a look at the changes in distribution of player payroll by salary level between 1998 (the last year the NBA had labor issues), and 2011:

Two things immediately jump out on the chart. One, in 1998 a much higher percentage of total player compensation was clustered at the lower ends of the salary scale, i.e. in players making $6M annually or less. By 2011, the 'spread' of payroll spend smoothed out quite dramatically, with more players (and payroll spend), moving up the salary chain, particularly in the $10M - $20M range. But almost as strikingly, there has been almost no growth in the extremely high compensation levels - on aggregate, more salary was expended in 1998 on players making above $20M annually than in 2011.

In the 1998 contract negotiations, the owners successfully put in place a system that 'capped' individual contracts in a manner by 2011 has kept current stars like LeBron James from reaching the compensation levels of past stars like Michael Jordan, (represented by the lone orange bar on the far right of the chart).

In the period of 1998-2011, the NBA owners were successful in controlling the extreme high end of the salary scale, but for that, saw salaries at the lower end, and more importantly the middle-range increase dramatically.  Over time, contracts awarded to 'solid but not spectacular' contributors have grown out of proportion to those players' contributions to the team's success (with exceptions of course).

One of the primary goals for the owners in this current negotiation is to try and get those mid-range, $6M - $14M or so contracts back under control, while still maintaining the grips on the superstar end of the market as well.

If indeed the NBA owners are in financial trouble, it isn't because the true superstars like LeBron and Kobe make exorbitant salaries, but rather due to the last 15 years of owners overpaying for average performers. Sure, you need quite a few of these 'average' performers to fill out a team, and assembling the right ones with complimentary skills and good attitudes is necessary to actually compete for and win championships, but paying superstar prices for average performance might win you a few games in the short term, but in the long run it will likely tick off the true stars, and might possibly bankrupt the team as well.

I guess that is the challenge for all HR and compensation pros, knowing you need superstar talent to win, and having to spend what it takes to get that superstar talent, while making sure you have enough of the pie left over for everyone else so they won't jump ship chasing a few dollars.

Finally - I promise, no more posts about sports for the rest of the week!