Personalizing the Pitch (it helps to be first)

More tales of high-stakes, big time recruiting from the world of sports, this time from the National Basketball Association, where last summer an unprecedented crop of high-quality players were free-agents, available to sign with the team of their choice. One of the prizes of the free-agent class was Carlos Boozer, a veteran scoring power forward, coveted by several teams. Boozer eventually signed with the Chicago Bulls, and part of the story of Boozer's recruitment is recounted in this  ESPN.com piece - Bulls went high-tech to land Boozer, that describes some of the high-tech, high-touch, and personalized tactics the Bulls employed in order to convince Boozer to to sign with the team.

A key component of the Bulls efforts was the creation and presentation of a personalized 'Carlos Boozer' iPad, loaded with Bulls information and team history, current player profiles, and a custom app that allowed Boozer to 'see' himself as a Bull.  From the ESPN.com piece:

That dude at Boozer's doorstep was Bulls senior director of game operations Jeff Wohlschlaeger. He presented to Boozer the newest and most cutting-edge recruitment tool that the Bulls, and several other NBA teams, had used: a decked-out iPad with a personalized app for the newly minted free agent, detailing how he would fit in with the Bulls if he would sign.

"He gave me a briefcase," Boozer said. "I pop open the briefcase, and it's an iPad with an intro to the team and the players that they had. The history, showing the championships that they had won in the past. Showing how good we can be if I came."

Boozer was impressed.

The Bulls certainly showed some initiative and creativity in creating and delivering the custom iPad, and even more importantly, they delivered the iPad to Boozer that day before the interview, and early enough in the free-agency period that the Bulls iPad was the first of many 'custom' iPads that the player eventually received from many other teams vying for his services.  While the custom iPad and custom apps were certainly cool and innovative, they were also easily copied, so having moved first, and aggressively at that, (hand delivery by a team official to Boozer's hotel room), the Bulls scored some serious points in the process, a process they eventually won, when Boozer signed with the team shortly after getting the iPad.

Lesson here - no matter how cool and ground-breaking your recruiting strategy is, chances are it can and will be copied by your competitors. When everyone is cranking out custom iPads to star candidates, if yours wasn't first, then it may as well have been last. Or you had better figure out where the game is going next and beat the pack there.

But the more important point is that once again we can take essential lessons from the world of sports and apply them to the realm of business.  A point that the crew known (really only to each other), as 'The 8 Man Rotation' will make on tonight's HR Happy Hour Show at 8PM ET on BlogTalkRadio. 

In the mix will be Kris Dunn, Tim Sackett, Lance Haun, and Matt Stollak, and you can join the fun on the show page here, or by calling in on 646-378-1086.

It's all sports these days, isn't it?

Soft, Selfish, or Stupid

Last week in Boston the fifth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was held, and while sadly I was not in attendance, the excellent ESPN True Hoop blog provided an outstanding series of posts that offered summaries and commentary from the conference.Does he need more practice?

One of the True Hoop posts reviewed a panel discussion titled 'Birth to Stardom, Developing the Modern Athlete in 10,000 Hours?'. This panel was moderated by 'Outliers' author Malcolm Galdwell, famous for his '10,000 hours' theory, (the time one needs to put it to achieve mastery at any given skill), and included (among others), Steve's HR Technology favorite basketball analyst, the great Jeff Van Gundy.

The discussion centered around the modern athlete and the debate surrounding the age-old question of nature vs. nurture. Do sports stars have innate, natural ability that assures success, or are they developed due to the combination of training, early identification, and almost obsessive focus on performance? In other words, does the '10,000 hours' theory apply at the highest levels of athletics?

While in athletics, the inherent physical characteristics that place most of the top performers at an advantage can't realistically be debated (if you are only 5' 3", putting in the 10,000 hours still likely won't land you in the NBA), what is open to discussion is the relative importance in athletic achievement of 'nurture', and the necessity of supremely physically talented athletes to diligently practice, refine, and improve their skills over time. As we know, many of the games greatest stars were not necessarily the hardest workers (see Iverson, Allen in 'Talkin' About Practice').

And certainly the access to and the involvement of mentoring and coaching play a role in athletic development as well; even the most dedicated pracitioner will need guidance along the path, and coaches have to be prepared to adapt their approaches to better fit the talents and goals of the athletes.

In the end, there seemed to be agreement (perhaps obvioulsly), that for most athletes, a combination of 'nature', (raw, physical traits and ability), combined with 'nurture' (work habits, dedication, ability to accept coaching), were necessary conditions for athletes to achieve their greatest potential.  Sure, it could be argued whether the '10,000 hours' level is really relevant in athetics (often the length of time needed to put it 10,000 hours would result in a loss due to aging and injuries of some of the raw physical abilities needed to succeed), but the basic equation of Raw Talent + Hard Work = Success seems to hold.

But beyond the obvious conclusion, the great Jeff Van Gundy offered up this nugget of wisdom, observing that all players that arrive in the NBA have at least a baseline of physical ability, i.e. there are no slow, short, unathletic players, but the real differentiators were more intangible.  According to JVG professional athletes need to balance the physical with the attitudinal.

JVG's money line: “Soft, selfish or stupid. You can be one of these things, but you can’t be two.” 

Super point, and one that likely applies beyond sports as well. While we all have this idea in our minds when we are managing, leading, or recruiting for our organizations of what the 'perfect' or 'high potential' employee looks like, the reality is those 'perfect' employees and candidates are almost impossible to define and to find. But often we don't admit this, and we just keep grinding, keep sourcing to uncover that one person out there that isn't 'soft, selfish, or stupid', when in reality we could live with having two of the three characteristics, and manage around the one that is missing.

The greatest players certainly, win on all three variables, but the other 95% that make up our teams, (and almost all of us) will fall short of at least one of them. Maybe instead of holding on to a mostly unrealistic chase for a once-in-a-generation star, we build up a solid team of role players that can feed off each other, and perhaps make up for one another's shortcomings, (as well as yours).

Winning Time

Here's a shocker - I am a huge NBA, and specifically a New York Knicks fan. Once, back in the day I got asked to leave a sports bar for loud protestations of a bad out of bounds call in the first quarter of a Knicks-Pistons game.

So naturally I was glued to the TV last night to watch the first Knicks game following the blockbuster trade that had the Knicks send 4/5 of their starting team to the Denver Nuggets to acquire Carmelo Anthony and Chauncey Billups, (there were some other players involved, but essentially these were the important aspects in the transaction).

The game, which resulted in a 114-108 Knicks victory over the Milwaukee Bucks, was an uneven, at times ugly, and almost hard to watch affair.  The Knicks were obviously having some difficulty adjusting to the new composition of the team, there was naturally a heightened sense of interest and excitement in the game it being Anthony's first as a Knick, and the Bucks, despite playing hard throughout, simply are not a very good team.

Anthony, the focus of intense discussion and speculation in recent weeks as the Nuggets tried to work out trades with several teams in the league, played an inconsistent kind of game.  Clearly a little nervous in the first half, he missed several easy shots he'd normally make, and had some difficulty throughout the game finding a natural rhythm and flow, particularly on offense.  His final stat line - 27 points on 10 for 25 shooting, 10 rebounds, and 2 steals.  On paper not a great game, not horrible, but on paper certainly not a performance that in the business world we would rate as 'Exceeds Expectations'.

But the old sports cliche, 'they don't play the games on paper' is usually true, and to make a fair evaluation of Anthony's performance, you would have to actually watch the game. Late in the fourth quarter the other Knicks star player, Amare Stoudemire had fouled out, leaving Anthony the primary option on offense for the team.  In these last few minutes of the game, Anthony hit two critical baskets, one a baseline drive and dunk, and the other about a 12-foot step back jumper, to cement the Knicks victory.  These two possessions and baskets were the most important ones of the game, and without them it would have been entirely possible for the Bucks to pull out a win.

I know you don't care about basketball, and if you have kept reading to this point, my thanks.

Why might any of this matter at all to business, work, management?  Because last night Carmelo struggled at times, shot a low percentage, looked a little tight, and for three-and-a-half quarters was wholly unremarkable.

But in the end, the part of the game known as 'Winning Time', he came though, and delivered what the team needed to for the victory.  If after the game the coach of the team were to give Anthony a classic performance review in the corporate sense, there is no doubt the bad shots in the first quarter, the passing the ball out of bounds, the confusion on defense - would all probably be duly recorded and noted.  Sure, the two huge buckets in the 4th quarter would make the review as well, but I bet they would appear to have equal, if not reduced, importance to the overall 'grade' as the negative plays.

The final performance rating would probably be a 'Meets Expectations' with possible recommendations to work on his shot, and study the team playbook.  

And I think we do this all the time when we manage people and write performance reviews.  We feel a kind of strange desire to make sure we find and highlight the negative, the odd item or two that has to be worked on, or to include the mention of some small incident, even a relatively unimportant one, as a kind of balance to the positive results achieved during the year. By creating this 'balance' we feel like we have been somehow more fair, but I bet the employees walk out of the meeting thinking only about the negative, and feeling like Carmelo would if instead of talking about the big baskets he made in the fourth quarter, we wanted to dive in to the missed layups in the first quarter.

Sure, we want to achieve top performance all the time, at every stage of the game so to speak, but is that realistic, or even possible?  I wonder if a better focus is needed on what is really important and what makes the critical difference between winning and losing.

I suppose we might need a better understanding of what 'Winning Time' means at work.

Basketball and Bad Hires

For the several years of his professional basketball career, Richard Jefferson was an extremely successful, popular, and accomplished player.  

A quick review of the first part of Jefferson’s career, (courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com), reveals two appearances in the NBA Finals, one year as a Top 10 scorer in the league, and two years averaging over 22 points scored per game.

Prior to the 2009-2010 season Jefferson was traded to the San Antonio Spurs, one of the best teams in the league over the past decade, and winners of four NBA championships in the last twelve years.

The Spurs roster is laden with all-time greats (Tim Duncan), current stars (Manu Ginobili), and international point guards/pretty boys (Tony Parker).  Their head coach, Gregg Popovich is regarded as one of the top two or three coaches in the entire league. While still a top-team, the Spurs core were starting to show some age, and an infusion of a fast, athletic, wing player who could score (Jefferson, pretty much exactly), was seen as an important step to help keep the Spurs in title contention.

So on paper the addition of Jefferson, an established solid-almost-star type player, to a team with a consistent winning tradition, full of smart, talented players, and a great coach should have been (forgive yet another basketball reference), a slam-dunk.  After a short adjustment period by the player and the team, Jefferson should have thrived, and the team should have greatly benefited and improved their overall play.  

So what actually happened in Jefferson’s first year with the Spurs?

He struggled. Mightily. His per game averages for scoring, rebounds, and assists plummeted from the performance standards he had established the past several seasons with his former team. Watching Jefferson play, he never seemed in synch or comfortable with the Spurs’ systems, and meshing with the other star players on the team.  Jefferson looked unsure, a step slow, and eventually it appeared like his confidence was shot, and ultimately he had the worst year of his career, by both statistical and observational objectives.

A classic bad signing, or in the workplace context, a bad hire.

Maybe.

Conventional wisdom says the organization needs to cut their losses, to find a way out of the contract, trade Jefferson for whatever they could get, or in the ‘normal’ world of work, simply give him the old, ‘It’s not working out’ speech and wish him well on the way out the door. A bad hire is a bad hire, right?

So what did the Spurs do after the 2009-2010 season ended?  

Instead of figuring out how to get whatever they could for Jefferson on the market, team coaches and officials challenged Jefferson to change his approach to the game to better fit his new team, their proven and successful playing style, and Coach Popovich’s expectations. For a veteran player, one that had quite a bit of personal success in this career, it would have been easy for Jefferson to balk or gripe or to pretend that the problem with his performance was some one else's.

Instead, Jefferson bought in to the program, and in the off-season worked hard on the specific parts of his game that needed improvement and refinement to better align with the team goals and style of play. So far, in 2010-2011 his performance is improved, and the team has had the best record in the league for most of the season. Sure, over time, age (Jefferson is 30, an age at which peak basketball performance is usually passed), and other factors might conspire to detract from his individual performance, but certainly through just over half of the season the decision by the team and player to work though their adjustment issues, and commit to doing the necessary work to adapt and improve appears to have been a good one.

Ultimately while Jefferson is no longer a star player, he is an important contributor making a significant impact on what is currently the best team in the league.  Will the Spurs win the championship this year? Who knows. But by most accounts the team’s decision to stick by their ‘bad hire’ a little bit longer than many would have wished seems to be paying off.

In the workplace it is often said that many leaders are too slow to pull the plug on under performers, and while that is certainly true in many cases it is likely also true that some leaders and organizations are too hasty.  Even traditionally strong performers, when placed into an entirely new environment, with new colleagues, systems, norms, and expectations, might take longer that originally hoped to make the necessary adjustments.

How long is too long?  When do you label someone a ‘bad hire?’

And when do you as a leader and organization make a commitment and challenge to turn the ‘bad hire’ into a high performer?

Postscript - I really can’t stand the Spurs, but that is because as a Knicks fan I am jealous of their success.

Hockey Fan (it's not me it's you)

'It's not you, it's me.'

The classic break up line used mainly by guys who want to weasel out of a romantic relationship with the least amount of prolonged discussion or lengthy drama. The 'it's not you, it's me' position attempts to effectively stifle dialogue by making it impossible for the 'you' in the debate to effectively counter-argue.NHL Winter Classic 2011

'But I can change'

'It's not you, it's me'

'I can be more understanding'

'It's not you, it's me'

'I can get rid of the cat', (ok, that one never happens)

'It's not you, it's me'.  You get the idea.

But often in the real world when we are trying to convince people of the value or excitement of a sport or hobby, the merits of an artist, or even a point of view on weightier matters like political, social, or economic policy'; we erroneously apply the 'It's not me, it's you' argument.

A simple (and certainly unimportant) example can be seen in how fans and aficionados of professional ice hockey tend to discuss their affinity for the sport, particularly with people that do not share their interest and enthusiasm. Often you will see hockey fan say things to non-fans like - 'You need to invest some time and get to know the game', 'You just don't appreciate the skills of the players and nuances of the game', or 'You really need to attend a game live and in-person to truly appreciate the sport', and so on.

And sometimes those kind of arguments come of as a little condescending, similar to the way connoisseurs of wine or abstract art can sound when expounding on the value and virtues of their interests.  It's fantastic to be engaged, proud, and excited about your passion, it sucks to back-handedly denigrate the rest of us that may not share those passions.

And since most of the convincing we need to do in our work is arguably more important than wrangling up a few more folks to watch the Winter Classic, I think we (myself included) would be well served to remember some simple truisms.

The better way to get people to buy in to your idea, adopt your proposal, read your blog, or subscribe to your worldview is not to try to convince them that they have a problem or are somehow lacking in intelligence or insight. But rather to realize that perhaps your point of view is the unusual one, the one that does not have obvious or inherent value to your audience, and is possibly too radical a departure from the norm to be easily adopted.

I am not a huge ice hockey fan.  And no number of 'You just don't get it' arguments will make me more likely to tune in.

In conclusion, you may have found this post to be dull, uninformative, and wholly not worth your attention. For that I apologize.  

Trust me, it's not you, it's me.