Sport as an analogy for Business

I just had something revealed to me, at age 70. I saw the trip by the Duke player named Filipowski on TV replay today. If you recall, he was the guy that was “hurt” by fans rushing the court a couple of weeks ago. Seemed then like it was going to be a big injury, but not so much?

Now to yesterday against North Carolina, at the Duke gym. He and a NC guy ended up on the floor, largely because “Filipo” actually knocked them down. Then, when they were getting up Filipo kicked his foot up, like a backhand, and tripped the other guy who got up quicker. Afterward he went on camera and gave a big line of BS.

Take that for what it is, but it illustrated to me an accepted mechanism that a coach tried to teach me when I went out for BBall in 9^th grade (1968). The coach actually instructed us to step on another player’s foot when waiting for a rebound, and that we could punch a guy in the ribs with one had while reaching up with the other hand to look like we were blocking a shot. He specifically mentioned that the refs could not see everything. (By the way that guy was eventually removed decades later because of sexually interplay with at least one student, just to show his true depth.)

Get that last none parenthesis line. That is the way that a whole lot of “businessmen” feel about those what might referee life behavior in the business world, especially including government “regulators” but also in house rules and enforcers.

OK, so that is the overview, now I will give you some specifics I experienced in sports and business.

I learned about MY basketball game in the Intramural Building at the University of Michigan beginning in 1971. There were 4 marvelous full sized wooden floor courts next to each other and the level of the game rose from the court furthest from the administrative part of the building constructed for that purpose (with squash and racket ball/hand ball courts under the basketball courts and king sized locker room on the other side of the administrative offices).

I learned there because it was the first time since 6^th grade that I did not have a coach who was insisting that I did things his way. Shit, that coach did not have my physicality or mentality as I was both fast and smart. Anyway, I made it to the first court before the start of the second semester and never fell below that in my 4 years.

I then started learning street ball on courts all around Detroit, throughout the 70s. When I left Ann Arbor I ended up being a Melter Foreman making 250 tons of molten steel out of molten pig iron and scrap that my crew and I “cooked” in two adjacent furnaces at the expected rate of one heat every 50 minutes. I was 23 and the shortest guy on the furnace crew has 26 years in the mill, since that was the heart of the mill and the highest paying union position. I was responsible for adding alloys into the furnace and the cooking techniques I employed in order to hit the target grade of steel desired on the daily list.

Here’s the thing, there was a parallel between the Mill and the Basketball that was played on the courts in southwest Detroit, which I discovered by doing the dance in both places without anyone telling me anything, just learning by doing.

In the Mill, you were not allowed to lie, as people were maimed and killed there when honesty was practiced such that a lie would almost insure danger to someone. Turned out the courts in Detroit were largely the same, but I had to learn that it did not stop those who would do things like Filio did in the Duke game yesterday.

I got stiches over my left eye at least 4 times from blind side punches that I never saw coming. I also had a contact broken in the left eye in Detroit and in Chicago from the same kind of, literally, blind sided hit out of nowhere.

The first time that happened was in Detroit, on a court just off Jefferson and actually in River Rouge which was just south of the Detroit border (which was the Rouge River that ran downstream from the original Ford plant.) After I recognized that I couldn’t see very well, I found a piece of the lens on my chest and asked a guy near me if the other piece was on my face. When he found none, I walked back over to the hoop and he asked what I was doing and I told him I could play him with one eye.

There was a life lesson that I renewed to myself in basketball. Turns out later in life I would apply that lesson in various business situations. If you get a blind side hit and don’t go down, everyone who is aware of it changes how they see you.

On that basketball court, I became greatly accepted, and I was the only Euro American guy even in the vicinity of the neighborhood, except cars driving by on Jefferson. One time, after I had been coming there for a couple of weeks, a guy who had not seen me before came down the middle and I got the ball clean and knocked him to the ground when our bodies met. He popped up and squared off facing me and I asked him what his problem was. “You knocked me down!” he said and that is when I told him, “That’s the way we play here.” All the other players jumped right on that and verbally agreed with me such that the guy have up his position. (By the way, in the Mill, as the college boy foreman, I was like a first Lieutenant in Viet Nam, but got accepted there as well by being honest, especially when I made a mistake.)

I ended up leaving the steel mill and going to law school in Detroit. I continued to play basketball, and kept shoes and a ball in my car (which was then a black on black ’76 Firebird Formula). In the worlds in which I practiced law I was then able to also practice the ethics that I learned as a kid, then refined in the steel mill, then really tested in three different “practices” as an Attorney and Counselor. In the end, though, I was merely a Lawyer: Tax Lawyer, Commercial Litigator, International General Counsel.

I will tell you this, the only time I really enjoyed shared honesty in my practice of law was in the middle adventure. That was because the guy that took me on was honest. Neither he nor I ever focused on that, but we ended up sharing the trait for 18 years before I moved on to the General Counsel position.

I understand that this came out because of what I saw on TV. I am not sure that the behavior of the coach way back then, and what I have witnessed on sports and business can ever be changed. In my last position I was still behaving as a lawyer, doing what I knew was right ethically and still preserving all contractual rights of the company in order to limit financial impact from anomaly events.

I got great results, but overrode decisions made ancillary to the solution of the problem. Those whose decisions were ignored finally ended up firing me. In private practice the lawyer fires the client, in house, the lawyer gets fired for the decisions he/she makes. In my tax practice I was let go after I advised a partner that the solicitation of a bonus following a better than expected result with the criminal side of the IRS was expressly precluded by the ethics rules applying in Michigan. The in house goodbye was predicated on a set of decisions about equipment going into a nuclear power plant in Slovakia, and I saved a lot of time and money by acknowledging that our side had the problem, not accusing them of a problem like the guy above wanted to do. Got loose of the problem for less than half of the amount on the Contingency Line item of the books.

Like I said, my boss, then partner, in private practice, exercised honesty at the same rate of application as did I – always. On more than one occasion, once leaving a courtroom and once leaving a judge’s chambers, he asked me, “What did you just do?” I asked him to describe what he saw, then I sorted it all out with him since on both occasions, my instinct had taken over. He quit asking after our first year together.

Well, that’s what came out today. As a guy named Forest once told me, “It’s no good unless you share it.”