Lessons from Lambeau

Maybe this is a bit of a stretch.

It’s easy to over-use sports metaphors when writing about business. Among their many limitations: Sports is unambiguous. You either win or you lose. When you (for example) deploy a new IT application, assessing the success of the effort is just a wee bit more ambiguous than that.

Second limitation: Sports is defined by how well you make split-second decisions. Business is defined in large part by how well you avoid making split-second decisions.

On the other hand, my wife has a cousin who plays for the Green Bay Packers, and after yesterday’s 42 to 20 victory over the Seahawks, it’s hard to resist the temptation.

So I won’t.

Some thoughts that might be relevant to running IT:

• The NFL asserts ludicrous intellectual property rights. During the game, an announcer said something to the effect that any commentary of any kind about the game is a violation. I didn’t hear anything about this being limited to commercial use, so be careful what you say about the game to friends over a beer.

• The intellectual property situation in this country has been problematic ever since Warner Brothers tried to warn off the Marx Brothers for unauthorized use of “Casablanca” in a movie title – a bad move by the way: Groucho’s ridicule is a model of how to handle this sort of thing. If you haven’t already read it, here’s a link to the letter he wrote in response.

It isn’t improving. Not to pick on Warner Brothers; the company never learns. You might recall its attorneys sent hundreds of cease-and-desist letters to children who had the temerity to think the 1st Amendment protected their right to put up Harry Potter fan sites on the web.

In like fashion, I might be violating the NFL’s asserted intellectual property rights right now. According to its website:

We (or our affiliates) and our member professional football clubs own all rights in the product names, company names, trade names, logos, product packaging and designs (“Trademarks”) of the National Football League and such member clubs, and third parties own all Trademarks in their respective products or services, whether or not appearing in large print or with the trademark symbol. Unauthorized use of any such Trademarks, including reproduction, imitation, dilution or confusing or misleading uses, is prohibited under the trademark laws of the United States and other countries. You are expressly prohibited from using or misusing any Trademarks, except as provided in this Agreement, and nothing otherwise stated or implied in the Service confers on you any license or right to do so.

So as an act of civil disobedience: Green Bay Packers. Seattle Seahawks. Great game.

That’s two unauthorized uses of NFL trademarks and one unauthorized description of the game. I guess the NFL will have to sue me.

How is this relevant to you? The right claimed by various software companies and purveyors of all sorts of adware and spyware to install software on your company’s computers without letting you know in advance is a direct descendant of this nonsense. The simple notion of property rights has been twisted around to an unrecognizable extent.

There’s nothing you can do about it, other than to be alert to even seemingly farfetched risks. I just felt like going off on a pointless rant. Sorry. The next two bullets are more relevant:

• Never mind his physical skills – I watched Brett Favre between plays. Quarterbacks don’t have to be leaders. That’s optional. Favre spent his time between plays encouraging players, talking with them, keeping them loose and focused … making sure his team was 100% in the game. You could see it in his body language and the body language of everyone he talked to.

This was a big deal when they were down 14 to nothing.

On the other hand, his physical skills mattered a lot, as did the physical skills of his players, for all the obvious reasons. What his leadership accomplished was to make sure his players heads were pointed in the right direction so that they would put their physical skills to the best use possible.

• The most important point: Early in the game, Ryan Grant lost the ball. Twice. Both fumbles turned into Seahawk touchdowns.

American business wisdom says we need to hold people accountable – that there have to be consequences for mistakes. American business wisdom is … wait, there’s a word for this and it will come to me … oh, now I have it … stupid.

Had the Packers operated according to this so-called wisdom they would have removed Grant from the game, and possibly from the team.

Instead they gave him the ball a lot and he rushed for more than 200 yards and three touchdowns in very difficult conditions.

Somewhere, there just might be a lesson in this for IT leaders, in spite of it being something that happened in professional sports.

Assuming the NFL doesn’t sue me for this unauthorized commentary I’ll be back to more standard fare in my next post.

– Bob

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