The Monkey Shack

As much as I love sports, drawing marketing and/or business analogies from them doesn't always work for me. But something happened over the weekend that I found quite interesting. My favorite college football team, the University of Washington, finished 0-12, the worst season in the school's history. They fired their coach after four seasons. The players looked disorganized, confused, and surprisingly apathetic during games this season. So they went outside the organization to find a new head coach to breathe life, and hopefully success, back into the program.

On the flip side, the University of Utah finished a regular season record of 12-0 and earning a BCS bowl berth. They had an incredibly successful season. But their head defensive coach was hired to become the coach at another school. Utah made a decision to promote from within, without even looking outside at any candidates. They didn't want to tinker with their system by bringing in someone from outside.

The two schools made two completely different philosophical decisions. True, one school was down and the other on top, but there is a principle in this that each business must ask themselves at some point. In his book "Good to Great", author Jim Collins presents his study of how to take a good organization and turn it into one that produces sustained, great results. Collins explains that the ultimate state of organization’s “greatness” is one in which all challenges and dilemmas are reduced to a simplistic idea called the "hedgehog concept" where strategies are founded on 3 circles: a deep understanding of 1) the organization’s passions 2) their capacity to succeed at one single goal to be the best in the world at something, and 3) what powers their economic drive.

He describes how time and time again, once a company enjoys success they no longer strive for innovation, but protect and insulate themselves from change. Collins says "If you donʼt look at things from a realistic point of view and admit that things are not as good as they can be, they wonʼt get better." Companies who fail to keep the passion in innovation and becoming the best in the world at something will ultimately become stale, eventually finding themselves looking up at a new market leader or an evolving marketplace in which they are unprepared to compete.

Did the UW or U of U make right or wrong choices for their coaches? Who knows, time will answer that one. But if Utah has indeed reached the point where they protect what they have obtained instead of continuing to grow and develop, it will be interesting to see if they eventually only fight to maintain mediocrity.