The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry

Putting strategy together is a fascinating, yet challenging, undertaking for any professional in the context of team sports organizations. This challenge often relates to the following question: How can sport managers deliver a successful off-the-field strategy when “success” is so highly dependent on what happens on the field? In their book, Irving Rein, a communications professor at Northwestern, Ben Shields, lecturer in managerial communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and sports consultant Adam Grossman provide a blueprint for sports leaders to deal with this very phenomenon. The authors highlight key factors and tools that, unlike winning, can be controlled and shaped by sports professionals in order to arrive at better strategic decisions.

The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry offers concrete solutions to the above-mentioned challenge in nine chapters and 29 short case studies that take us through a broad spectrum of real-life scenarios. Whether it is the development of the “Ballpark Synagogue” for the minor league baseball club South Bend Silver Hawks in order to fit to the city’s history and culture (pp. 1-2), the new “Brooklyn-ized” identity of the NBA Nets (pp. 17-19), or the failure to develop public support of Brazilians for the 2014 World Cup held in their country (pp. 121-122), The Sports Strategist draws an accurate roadmap for the growing complexities of the sports business through practical applications of the strategies discussed.

In essence, each chapter delineates one aspect of what sports professionals need to do in order to move away from the so-called “winning fallacy”; that is, that winning on the field alone “will not create a winning business over the long-term” (p. 4). Having detailed the limitations of the “winning fallacy” in Chapter 1, Rein, Shields, and Grossman proceed to lay down the necessary foundation of any successful business entity; that is, the design of a strong and clear brand identity (Chapter 2), which not only facilitates decision-making at the internal level, but crucially, also serves as the platform for long-lasting relationships with influential external stakeholder groups such as fans/customers, sponsors, and government, as well as the media. However, in order to create and then maintain a strong and clear brand identity, the construction of enduring narratives plays a protagonist role in this process. In Chapter 3, therefore, The Sports Strategist details the three phases of the narratives’ design – namely, assessing the audience, identifying storylines, and building the narrative (p. 48) – and through numerous examples, the book illustrates these narratives’ enduring “ability to disarm its audience,” thereby becoming a “more effective persuasive technique than more traditional argument structures of assertion and evidence”. A central role in how a sports professional designs the narrative for his/her respective organization is played by the way this person masters new technologies (Chapter 4). Rein and his co-authors favor the proactive (rather than reactive) approach on the adoption by sports professionals of new media platforms to meet their business objectives. Specifically, in this chapter the authors lay down a blueprint for how sports professionals can deal with the issues of technological change, as well as the challenges posed by the new players entering the marketplace.

The next chapter, Chapter 5, investigates the importance of deploying quantitative analytics to inform business-related decision-making processes. The Sports Strategist’s stance in this regard is pretty firm: “analytics – i.e., defining revenue, determining willingness-to-pay, mining data, analyzing regressions, and monetizing audiences – will play an important role on the business side of the sports industry in the foreseeable future” (p. 120), and therefore, the application thereof will make a sports strategist successful. Another important aspect that sports professionals must consider when devising the strategies for their teams is the process of developing public support (Chapter 6), and concrete ways to do just that are offered in the 25 pages of this chapter. By delivering value to the communities where the teams reside, and by lobbying and building relationships with influence-wielding public figures, these sports organizations can ensure that they will keep receiving key sources of funding, despite the increased tensions between statutory organizations and sports franchises. More often than not, however, in the increasingly contentious marketplace in which sports teams exist and operate, various types of scandals associated with violence, gambling, illicit drug use, performance enhancement, sex, fraud, corruption, racism etc., put these sports organizations in a state of crisis (Chapter 7), which can jeopardize “decades of goodwill and success” (p. 149). For this reason, The Sports Strategist devotes enough space to illustrate what may cause a crisis in the sports industry, what a sports professional can do to prevent a crisis, and perhaps even more importantly, when a crisis moment arrives, the choices one has to respond to the crisis – because, as the authors emphasize, “determining the type of response, style of delivery, and desired channels of communication dictates the extent of the damage” (p. 178).

Chapter 8 steers the discussion toward ways through which sports professionals can increase attendance by reinvigorating the team’s sports facility. A recurring challenge in modern sports is how to continue drawing people to the venues, and offering them a “delightful” service experience; hence, the marriage of in-venue live events with technology, in addition to the extension of the “sportscape” concept beyond the venue itself and into the surrounding environments, the authors argue, “is vital to enhancing live events” (p. 202), and can thereby drive attendance. The final section of this book, Chapter 9, concerns the value for sport organizations in using ethical frameworks and principles in their decision-making. In particular, Rein, Shields, and Grossman assert that by integrating the notions of transparency, integrity, and inclusivity into the way team sports organizations operate, better businesses can be built. They illustrate their argument through various examples from the sports industry, so the reader can easily see how such integration can be achieved.

The book is generally interesting, well-written, and has a clear and rational structure. The scope of the book is presented at the beginning, and enough background information is given to draw the context in which it operates. In addition, the book offers a comprehensive view of the challenges the sports industry is facing nowadays, while some of the strategies promoted in the book are applicable to other industries as well. For instance, the utilization of social media for communication purposes and the use of new information technologies for data mining and analysis may be of interest to executives from industries beyond professional sports.

Readers, however, should be prepared for a heavy citation/reference bias toward the North American sports context. Almost all, for example, of the case studies (if one excludes the World Cup in Brazil) come from the US sports market. This might be problematic, for while several concepts have practical implications to all sports organizations across the globe, there are arguably differences between the USA and other sports settings. For instance, the relocation of the NBA’s Seattle Supersonics mentioned in the book would be simply out of question for a professional European team. Therefore, one suggestion involves the integration of more case studies from the European and Australasian professional sports market when presenting each of the proposed strategies in the book.

As a final observation, although the authors do mention (p. 15) how they arrived at those nine factors that can position an organization for success without an over-reliance on winning, some additional information on the empirical, methodological part (as in the form of an appendix) would have added a much more rigorous and credible dimension to the – nevertheless – illustrative picture offered in this 230 pages-plus long book.

These minor quirks aside, The Sports Strategist is an excellent book, and indeed a solution- focussed one (p. 16). As the authors claim, it is designed to answer the question of “how to succeed in sports business without relying solely on winning on the field” (p. 16). We strongly believe the book offers some concrete and useful answers in this regard.