I try to read as many books that are going to accommodate what I need to be for my job. I need to be a great coach, not just to the paying customers and athletes but to my coaches and staff as well.
Innovation or great ideas are not something that come to you in a sudden moment of clarity. Inspiration is exploration. The more you seek, the more you see. This book by Beth Comstock was really good. It is a story of an executive that was tasked with moving a big slow corporation with modernizing and making something out of nothing.
What I really enjoyed about this was the parallels to trying to progress your department within a rigid structure such as an athletic department. When Beth was talking about adopting a start up mentality within General Electric, I got the burning sensation up my spine when suggesting something that we have never done before.
Meeting with my head coach or sports medicine about something we wanted to push as a strength staff, only to be met with opposition. I have always had a certain level of anxiousness in trying to push for change. The status quo never excited me, which as I was reading this book I felt Comstock’s methods as much more diplomatic and structured to initiate change within an existing entity like her experience with GE or NBC.
The biggest aspect from the book I most enjoyed was the creation of Hulu at NBC. They used the term disruption quite a bit, which became mildly annoying, but it proved the point. You have to be redundant to get what you want! Which in this case was to revolutionize their approach to media. Netflix was on the rise, big corporate stations with broadcast TV was declining, NBC needed to move in a new direction. Implementing sports science or new methods with a team that has had success is hard. We can romanticize the book Legacy “when you are top, change it up”, but that is not as easy as one would think. Change and evolution is hard.
Bringing in an entrepreneurial attitude. Setting up a bare bones office with people’s value was only as good as their ideas was critical. The term is ‘incubation’, where you force people into a setting and only can come out when they have something revolutionary. What was critical was it was allowed to flourish though means of disrupting other existing entities. One example was converting old shows that were decades removed from syndication into digital to be streamed on the Hulu platform. This was met with extreme opposition from the archives department fighting to uphold an arbitrary thought that these were classics and their legacy could not be tarnished by being converted to a digital medium.
Which is ridiculous in hindsight, but we have all run into a brick wall of entrenched/siloed departments. Hey we want to integrate a Functional Movement Screen – Too much work. Hey we want to integrate Sports Science – we don’t have the manpower. Hey we want to upgrade our Sports Nutrition – we don’t have the resources. It is a constant battle knowing you could do more or change in a positive way, only to be met with natural hesitancy for fear of having to work harder or something might not work. Taking a page out of Comstock’s book, be persistent and focus on the end result when met with opposition within your department and with others.
The book is good. It dragged on with too many examples. Thought the same with Measure with Matters, we get the point OKRs help, but proves a point that as we progress in our career we need to uphold a standard of willingness to change. It is a good book for a coach that wants more. It is a bad book if you look at your job as we are good at what we do and view change as we are going to be bad before we get good, so why change at all.