Menu

One reason why I love English football

November 27, 2009 By Leadership, Organization 3 Comments

tottenham

When I was 10 years old, my family moved to Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, just on the north edge of London and eight miles away from White Hart Lane, the home of Tottenham Hotspur.  I lived in the area for three years which were glorious years to be a Spurs fan, as we won two FA Cups and had a great team with the likes of Glen Hoddle, Ozzie Ardilles and Ricardo Villa.  I grew to like football alot, and although I lost touch for a number of years, the rise of internet video has made it easy to follow my team once again, and so I have been, especially this year, when we are having a great season.

English football runs on a very different system than North American sports.  As a lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan, I have recently abandoned a 40 year addiction to NHL hockey because the league is screwed.  In North America, the league owns the teams.  there are no real home teams, and with the exception of a few that will never leave, the NHL can whimsically move franchises hither and yon, even to the desert of Arizona if they wish, which on the face of it doesn’t seem like a very good place to move a team from Winnipeg.  And it wasn’t.

In short, the League controls the teams and top down control mechanisms are a little disingenuous when it comes to fan support.  Fans give the impression that the team is theirs but it really isn’t.

In contrast, British sports are very much a bottom up model.  Although the Football Association is well established, it is a chaordic structure that is based on an agreement.  The FA looks after the national teams and runs a tournament called the FA Cup.  Teams choose to play in the Football League, or not, which structures home and away fixtures through several divisions.  Teams play in one division and can move up and down depending on how well they do year to year.  At the highest level, teams play in the Barclay Premier League, the elite league, and yet another chaordic structure.  The Leagues do not determine which franchises will play where, nor whether or not a club can exist.  Each one simply sets rules of engagement for it’s own tournaments, and everyone signs on.  The result is that in the FA, you have teams who are owned by multi billionaires and you have teams that are owned by supporters.  Certainly to compete at the highest levels you need the talent that money can buy and so the teams at the top usually have a big backer or two.  But the nature of promotion and relegation within the League system means that little fish can enter the big leagues, and so you get these family owned clubs like Wigan (who were the butt of jokes as a fourth division team when I was a boy) entering and staying on at the top flight with the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea and my beloved Spurs.

And that structure and sense of family, and reliance on the supporters for their ongoing existence means that gestures such as this one are possible: Last week Spurs racked a record win against Wigan, beating them 9-1 at White Hart Lane.  The Wigan players were so ashamed of their performance that they got together and offered to refund Wigan fans who attended the match OUT OF THEIR OWN SALARIES: (See  Wigan refund fans who witnessed Spurs massacre.)   That kind of bottom-up accountability comes with a longstanding relationship between players, owners and fans.  That would never happen in North America, where players and owners are immune from performance, where all that maters is money and if you lose, you move.  Wigan can’t move.  They either survive or fold.  And their survival depends entirely on their supporters.

So I’m doubly impressed this week, with the Wigan players for displaying great integrity and for Spurs for kicking their asses!

From the feed

November 27, 2009 By Uncategorized

Plucked fruits from surfing the web

More on the aesthetics of slow

November 24, 2009 By BC, Flow

A Harvard business professor asks his students to think about elBulli, a fascinating restaurant near Barcelona

To eat at elBulli, customers must navigate a mysterious reservations system. If they are lucky enough to be one of the 8,000 who get a booking that year, they are then given a date and time to show up. Reaching elBulli’s coastal perch involves traveling to Barcelona, then negotiating two hours of narrow, twisting mountain roads. But then they enjoy a five-hour meal of thirty-some completely original, whimsical dishes prepared by Adrià and his team of thirty to forty cooks. The meal costs roughly 230 euros and represents hours of laborious research, testing, and preparation. In addition to engaging a diner’s five senses, Adrià and his team hope to evoke irony, humor, and even childhood memories with their creations…

Norton asks students to consider the operations and marketing of elBulli. There is much about the restaurant that is inefficient, as MBAs are quick to note: Adrià should lower his staff numbers, use cheaper ingredients, improve his supply chain, and increase the restaurant’s hours of operation. But “fixing” elBulli turns it into just another restaurant, says Norton: “The things that make it inefficient are part of what makes it so valuable to people…”

Because Adrià [the owner] doesn’t adhere to business norms, the elBulli case shows just how broad the spectrum for marketing a “product” can be–and that’s not a bad thing for MBAs to learn. “Marketing is a science, but it’s also an art,” Norton remarks.

“Adrià says he doesn’t listen to customers, yet his customers are some of the most satisfied in the world. That’s an interesting riddle to consider.”

(via Customer Feedback Not on elBulli’s Menu)

First off, marketing IS NOT A SCIENCE.   And art is not marketable, not in the traditional Business School sense anyway.  The fact that Adria’s customers are content is not a surprise to anyone that understands how quality works.  Norton’s comments strike as either disingenuous or naive.

So MBAs of the world, please look at what Adria is doing and think about what it really means, and use your prodigious talents and influence to fix the bland homogeneity of western consumer culture.

Improvisations: Rice

November 24, 2009 By Improv

A story of an improvisor with exacting standards:

My father, seventy-eight, is a methodical man. For thirty-nine years, he has had the same job, cataloguing books for a university library. He drinks two glasses of water first thing in the morning, walks for an hour every day, and devotes almost as much time, before bed, to flossing his teeth. “Winging it” is not a term that comes to mind in describing my father. When he’s driving to new places, he does not enjoy getting lost.

In the kitchen, too, he walks a deliberate line, counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal (fifteen) and never boiling even a drop more water than required for tea. It is my father who knows how many cups of rice are necessary to feed four, or forty, or a hundred and forty people. He has a reputation for andaj–the Bengali word for “estimate”–accurately gauging quantities that tend to baffle other cooks. An oracle of rice, if you will.

Read on:  Improvisations: Rice : The New Yorker.

Beauty and speed

November 24, 2009 By Art of Harvesting, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Flow One Comment

From  How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic:

I was intrigued by this line from a new paper by John N. Ivan, Norman W. Garrick, and Gilbert Hanson titled “Designing Roads That Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds”:

The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by about 5 percent and the number of vehicles traveling at high speeds between 50-60 km/h decreased by about 12 percent during the cherry blossom period.

One imagines a whole new sub-field of traffic engineering, with myriad questions: Do certain buildings or even architectural styles affect driver behavior? Can beautiful people literally “stop traffic”?

This is a lovely observation.

Lately I have been working as much as possible with graphic recorders who bring a level of beauty into a meeting that has a similar effect.  When people work with graphic recorders, they approach the wall reflectively, take care to choose their words and make sure that what they are adding to the record is somehow commensurate with the aesthetic experience being captured.

People want more effective meetings and gatherings and I think a key way to get to effectiveness is to slow down.  Slowing down can only happen in a physical environment where there is beauty that can catch our eye, catch ahold of the flow of conversations and cause little swirls and eddies that invite it to loop back on itself, become reflective and therefore effective.