Bad Sports

No one who spends even the shortest of periods in American business can escape the use of the sports metaphor. Advertising. Awards plaques. Rah-rah sessions. Sales kick-offs with the inspirational speech given by the ex-Olympian or pro-athlete who's now on the lecture circuit.

We've all seen it all, haven't we?

I very much enjoy sports, and am not averse to using sports analogies. I even did one product campaign around a baseball theme. (We plugged in soccer for international, but it didn't work quite as well without a pitcher, a catcher, and home plate.)

But we see so much of the "sports stuff" used and abused, that it starts to lose all meaning.

I remember one company meeting that included a good half dozen slides that showed pictures taken at football games. As the company president ran through his mind-numbing speech on how we were going to execute our plays with him as the quarterback, play to win, come to play, I - the impatient, bored little I that there's none of in team - wanted to scream out the old New Yorker caption: Block that metaphor! It didn't help my mood that most of the pictures seemed to be showing dirty or out-and-out illegal plays - neck tackles, cheap shots, piling on.

Then there was the sales kick-off with Mia Hamm. Nice touch to have a woman athlete for a change, but ho-yawn-hum. And I guess it's safe to say that it didn't really inspire the sales force - the company went bankrupt. (Paying Mia Hamm's fee probably didn't help out any, but we were such big spenders at Genuity that it probably didn't hurt much, either.)

Yes, sports tells a good story about hard work, team work, playing smart, climbing to the top, staying on top, starting from the bottom, perservering, getting in your game, surmounting tough competition, exploiting your strengths and their weaknesses. We get it already. While it's certainly more useful as a governing metaphor than, say, the literary world - inspire your team with the life of the great writer who made his three wives miserable until he drank himself to death, but not before disowning his son - enough gets to be enough pretty quickly. While it's probably not right to throw sports metaphors out of the game entirely - or even call a foul - companies who over-use sports-talk should consider a time out.

The use of all sports as metaphor reminds me of a Little League game I sat through a number of years ago. (Long ago enough that the Celtics were a championship team.) The kids had been a bit lackadaisical on the field. They didn't appear to know how many outs there were at any given time. One kid had been told to "take right", and he'd walked down to the furthest point on the edge of the park and pressed his body into the corner of the fence. When he got on base, another kid took a lead off second - but in the direction of first.

Anyway, the coach decided to give the kids a bit of a pep talk, and told them that they should emulate the Celtics: playing heads-up, focusing on the game, playing smart, etc. The coach's younger son - who looked to be about five or six, too young for the team - was playing in the dirt in front of the bench. When his father finished his little talk, the kid looked up at his father and said, "That's beside the point. We're not the Boston Celtics."

Precisely.

And, of course, there's the pick-and-choose element to exactly what parts of sports we hold up for emulation. And the blind eye we turn to the less savory aspects: player loyalty to fans and team and team loyalty to players (which, come to think of it, is the perfect metaphor for the 21st century relationship between an individual and his job: we're all free agents these days); using steroids to pump up records; betting on games; spitting tobacco; deliberate fouls; out-and-out cheating; ridiculous end-zone dances. 

Hmmmm. I might be on to something here. Think of how much more fun those sports-laden company meetings and sales-kickoffs would be if they focused more on smack talkin' the competition than they do on gravitas pronouncements about "no I in T-E-A-M."