Win by Frank I. Luntz

Author:Frank I. Luntz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hyperion

I believe that the business world has a lot to learn from the sports world, and that’s why you see numerous references to great athletes of modern times on these pages. The principles of winning that sports stars take for granted the rest of us need to learn. Sportscaster Jim Gray has been an astute observer of athlete behavior for three decades. For him, it’s the partnership, the teamwork, that turns great players into winners. Says Gray:

You’re only as good as your weakest link. Michael Jordan didn’t just show up at a game. He can’t inbound the ball to himself. He has to throw it to somebody so they’ll throw it back to him. He understood that if it weren’t for Phil Jackson, Frank Hamblen and Tex Winter and Jim Cleamons putting all of the right people in the right places defensively and offensively, if he didn’t have the trainer to tape his ankles, if he didn’t have the travel secretary to make sure that plane got him there on time, if he didn’t have the whole confluence of events that it takes to win, then he wouldn’t win. Would he be great? Yes. But he can’t do it alone.

LeBron James is great, but has LeBron James won a championship? No. Why not? Because all the people around him are not fulfilling the expectations that he has, and they’re not able to lift him to where he has to be because they all aren’t doing their job as well as they need to be.

You have to trust people, you have to allow them to do their jobs, and you have to put the best people in their jobs so that you can succeed as a leader. If you don’t have good people around you and you think it’s all about you, you’ll be the first to hit the door. A lot of people who get near the top don’t understand that it’s not just because of them, it’s because of everything that everyone has done for them that’s put them there.

Sports celebrities began lending their popularity to products almost a century ago, but business partnerships between sports and brands rarely endured and often involved nothing more than free travel and free stuff. Television made the relationship a lot more valuable for both sides, but few consumer brands were willing to shell out the big bucks for the popular stars of the day or to stick with a marketing campaign for more than a few months. But all that changed when a beaten and battered “Mean Joe” Greene tossed his dirty football jersey to a starstruck kid before chugging a Coca-Cola. Still regarded as one of the best ads of all time, it changed the image of the player and product and jump-started sports-product partnerships. Several years later, Miller beer took its Miller Lite brand to a new level by highlighting the player-product partnership. More than a dozen sports legends, including John Madden, Red Auerbach, and Yogi Berra appeared on television to declare either “tastes great” or “less filling.

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