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  Lasorda rode this first wave of Sportsthink, which was mostly about celebrity, charisma, cachet. It was a McLuhan-esque affair wherein the man was the message, even when the man had no message, or when the man’s message was indecipherable. This is not said in jest. At one time the biggest draw, arguably, was none other than O. J. Simpson, who preached to standing-room-only crowds despite diction so poor that he could barely be understood. “It doesn’t really matter what O.J. says,” a booking agent told me with surprising candor. “It’s just that he’s here.” During the early 1990s, the evolving Sportsthink movement made cottage industries of O.J., Lasorda, Walsh, and just about everyone else who’d ever achieved anything on a gridiron, court, rink, track, or baseball diamond.

  To be sure, demand for high-profile speakers remains strong. “Companies want to show employees how much they care about their success,” Marc Reede of Nationwide Speakers Bureau told me. “The way to do that is to produce a top speaker.” Reede’s company delivers those speakers to clients including IBM, Coca-Cola, the Ford Motor Company, and Mutual of Omaha. Soccer sprite Mia Hamm has commanded Lasorda-like fees ever since her 1999 World Cup exploits; in return, she delivers such nostrums as “The person who says winning isn’t everything never won anything” and “Many people say I’m the best women’s soccer player in the world. I don’t think so. And because of that, someday I just might be.” Mike Eruzione, the affable captain of the gold medal–winning 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, has recently ridden the crest of a renewed patriotic fervor (not to mention a popular film chronicling his team’s stunning victory). “Mike’s the hottest sports speaker in the country,” Reede told me in early 2004. “He had only seven or eight open days in February.”

  But in recent years, a funny thing happened on the way to the banquet hall: a gradual but inexorable shift from event-based to culture-based motivation, wherein Sportsthink became less about pep talks and more about daily business life. Corporate leadership now expected employees not merely to applaud the message but also to live it, dutifully importing as many aspects of sports as possible into the activities of the 9-to-5 workplace. Nowadays all this personal transformation takes place under the watchful eye of variously pedigreed noncelebrity consultants (like Karlene Sugarman, a consultant since grad school) who work on-site with corporate HR offices for weeks or months at a time, at $1,000 a day or more. Naturally, since the goals for today’s Sportsthink are so much more ambitious, the program must be packaged differently; for starters, it must be a program, not just a book or a speech or a series of either. The key word, however, is packaged. Modern Sportsthink has been covered by a layer of intellectual, parascientific respectability—but when that layer is peeled back, one is still left with “ya gotta want it.” As much as any manifestation of SHAM, Sportsthink forms an object lesson in how people desperate for easy answers (or wanting added consulting income) will impose order on chaos, filling in any inconvenient gaps, much as the human eye finds coherent images in a Rorschach inkblot.

  Herewith, the overlapping precepts of what might be called the emperor’s new attitude:

  SUCCESS IS A CHOICE. Pitino said it explicitly, but many other Sportsthink gurus also preach that everything is within your grasp, that environmental obstacles can be overcome if you just follow Kirk Gibson’s lead by calling on your psychic and emotional stockpiles. “Every moment of the day provides a new opportunity to take the fearful or fearless path,” Jeff Greenwald, a former tennis pro and the founder of Mental Edge International, told me. “The sum of these choices will determine the quality of our performance with customers and coworkers and, ultimately, our results.” This attitude über alles mantra grossly and unfairly oversimplifies the mechanisms of both winning and losing. According to Mark Fichman, PhD, an organizational consultant attached to Carnegie Mellon University, mental attitude is a “relatively small [factor in success] compared to your location in the social world to begin with.” Archly, he adds, “It is easier to become president if your father was president.” Fichman also underscores the logical flaw in selecting only successful figures, like Riley and Walsh, and asking them to reflect on the attitudes and behaviors that (supposedly) got them where they are. “When Bill Gates tells us he dropped out of school, that does not mean dropping out of school is a key to success,” says Fichman. “Obviously if you looked at all the dropouts, you would not conclude it’s a good thing to do.”

  THE INDIVIDUAL MUST NEVER WAVER IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY. Like the palooka who gamely pulls himself up off the canvas after each knockdown, the dedicated employee is expected never to waver in his pursuit of the brass ring, no matter the battering he takes en route. This bespeaks heart, yes—but also a certain macho bluster. Because this bulletproof, bullheaded mind-set cannot always be shut off at will, it may bleed over into other areas of life, with untoward results. “People need to know that it’s OK to falter sometimes,” Benjamin Dattner, PhD, a principal in Dattner Consulting and a professor of organizational development at New York University, told me. “This approach of being constantly ‘on’ and never saying die is a key cause of burnout, if not potentially worse.”

  THE “GAME” COMES FIRST. Relationships, personal issues, extracurricular interests, even family—all take a backseat to the Almighty Job. This stricture has been especially hard on women, who already experience crushing pressure to choose between their domestic lives and careers. True winners aren’t expected to avail themselves of such “easy outs” as the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows employees to take time off from work to care for a newborn child or sick relatives.1

  WINNING IS, INDEED, THE ONLY THING. Vince Lombardi’s favorite declaration has taken on new meaning in corporate settings, where the lesson becomes “Nothing matters but the end result.” Foreign to Sportsthink are such words and concepts as compromise, conciliate, and—perish the thought—concede. In the battle for market share, you don’t create truces, you don’t build bridges; you vanquish your enemy, period. This schema gives little credence to effort and does not take into account the fact that failure may occur for a variety of reasons. Critics link this axiom more than any other aspect of Sportsthink to the erosion of business ethics in recent decades. “Corrupt business practices have been with us since the dawn of business itself,” John K. Mackenzie told me, “but the ‘win at all costs’ construct, imported from sports during the 1980s, greatly magnified the inclination to cheat.” This was in fact the ethos captured with brutal clarity in such cinematic period pieces as Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.

  It may be useful to take a step back and ask whether Sportsthink even has true validity in sports itself. In fact, the emphasis on “mental attitude” in athletics is all-pervading, to the point that the tendency to reason backward from an observed outcome in order to find the psychic predisposition that caused it has gotten downright silly. When sprinter Michael Johnson won one of his gold medals in the 1996 Olympics, NBC’s track announcers reeled off just about every SHAM-inspired cliché imaginable; the notion that Johnson was simply faster than his competitors seemed not to occur to anyone. After a seventeen-year-old Russian upset the heavily favored Serena Williams at the 2004 Wimbledon championship, NBC tennis commentator Ted Robinson gushed, “Maria Sharapova came out with a full-fledged belief that she was able to win a Wimbledon championship!” Again, it was Sharapova’s belief that won Wimbledon, not her ability to return Williams’s 120-mile-per-hour serves or to uncork laserlike forehands that ran poor Williams back and forth across the baseline all morning. Contests in all athletic realms are put before us as modern Homeric allegories—crucibles of wit, grit, and will. Today’s victorious teams seldom credit talent or luck or even hard work, but rather the likes of “character” and “confidence” or, as Lasorda counsels us, “wanting it more than the other guy.” Every key play of every game is explained in terms of the attitude—good or bad—that held the participants in its grasp at the moment the fateful play occurred. We hear of players who “refuse to lose”—basketba
ll players who drive to the hoop with “fire in the belly,” gridiron defenses who hold firm thanks to a “gut check,” pitchers who get that final out “through sheer determination.” On the other hand, a pitcher who gives up a decisive home run at an inopportune moment has “lost his concentration.” Isn’t it possible, just possible, that he merely lost his fastball, or threw a curve that failed to go where he’d aimed it?

  Evidently not. This school of thought is seldom questioned in competitive athletics today. The players themselves parrot these arguments in interviews, crediting their success to everything but their physical skills. Notice that in the two different quotes about baseball superstar Barry Bonds at the top of this chapter, David Bell—relatively young and thus more likely a product of “ya gotta want it” brainwashing—talks about Barry Bonds’s “confidence,” which is what the Morning Call sportswriter focused on for much of the article. Only in the final paragraphs did the writer get around to quoting Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt. Coming as he does from a generation less steeped in the attitude-is-all blather of today, Schmidt quite sensibly notes that among Bonds’s other miscellaneous attributes are extraordinary strength and hand-eye coordination. When you’re trying to hit a baseball boring in at 96 miles per hour over a 20-foot-tall fence that’s 350 feet away, those things can help.

  Though one is tempted to play the topic for laughs, some observers feel that the possible long-term effects are no laughing matter, especially when this “killer mentality” is drilled into athletes as young as Little Leaguers—as it so often is by coaches who think they’re doing the kids a favor.2 Well-known sports psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella told me, “I worry about the guilt these spiels create in young men and women who may fail to perform for reasons that have nothing to do with ‘dedication’ or ‘heart.’ ”

  But you can’t tell any of that to people raised on today’s Sportsthink (or who make their living selling it). “Athlete is a powerful word,” intones Dr. Patrick Cohn of Peak Performance Sports, who consults for IBM and other blue-chip companies. “Athletes walk with pride. Athletes aren’t afraid of challenges. Athletes persist in the face of doubt and defeat.” True enough. But left unsaid is: What does that have to do with you or me? The nonathlete reading such affirmations has no reason to look or feel confident. Athletes walk with pride or persist in the face of doubt because they have specific competencies in the realms in which they compete: the ability to run faster than most other humans, to reach more than ten feet into the air and jam a basketball into a hoop, to swivel on ice skates more deftly than most of us can maneuver on dry land. “That’s where they get their confidence,” observes Jim Bouton, a celebrated baseball iconoclast and the author of the legendary tell-all book Ball Four. In a line with clarion implications for anyone weighing the benefits of undertaking some hot new self-help regimen, Bouton told me, “They don’t become confident simply by having some other athlete scream at them, ‘Now go out there and be confident!’ You can’t just paste confidence onto yourself.”

  Jay Kurtz, the president of KappaWest, a leading tactics-based consulting firm, agrees. “We’re coaxing people to buy into a conceit that’s suspect to begin with, and even if they do buy in, there’s almost no guidance on how to translate that conceit into useful practice,” he told me. “It’s all psychological gamesmanship.” Kurtz argues that Sportsthink gurus “took a short, punchy, profitable metaphor and converted it into an extended, even more profitable metaphor. But it’s still a metaphor.” And like most metaphors, it breaks down under deeper scrutiny. Which may explain why leading Sportsthink aficionados fall back on the quasi-religious line that you “just have to trust it.”

  Whatever parallels exist between sports life and corporate life dissolve just beneath the surface anyway. For example, in the summer of 2004, as in every Olympic year, “Go for the gold!” became the dominant theme at major meetings and conventions, with company brass exhorting key personnel to emulate the qualities displayed by top Olympians. In fact, Olympic-level performances seldom result from camaraderie, consensus problem solving, and the other amiable behaviors HR departments assiduously tout. “Olympic medals,” says Mackenzie, “often go to temperamental loners who shun teamwork and labor for years under conditions of obsessive personal sacrifice that few if any mainstream employees would tolerate.” Adds Benjamin Dattner, “Tiger Woods makes his own bed when he stays at a hotel in a golf tournament, because he’s such a perfectionist. But that same unity of focus that makes him a perfectionist might make it difficult for him to be a manager, or even to be very adaptable, in a corporate environment.”

  Kurtz, meanwhile, points out that Sportsthink miscasts the actual situation facing most companies that try to adapt it to their needs. “Sports like baseball and football are one team versus another. In business, you’re hardly ever going up against just one team. So if you use the sports model, where you’re engaging a single competitor at a time, you could outfox Competitor A but leave your flank open for Competitor B to kick your ass.” Says Dattner, “In sports you may use different strategies, but everybody plays by the same basic rules. In the business world, this is not the case.”

  For such reasons, many observers believe that Sportsthink saps precious resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

  “Most of these regimens are a mile wide and an inch deep,” says Kurtz. “Very few of them ever get down to the really gutsy things people have to do within a company to bring about meaningful change.” Those “gutsy things,” he says, include everything from workshops on defeating customers’ specific objections to a top-to-bottom retooling of the corporate reporting structure to gutting a specific underperforming unit within that hierarchy. Kurtz particularly warns against instances in which Lasorda-like fervor is applied in the absence of skill: “The most dangerous people in the world are the highly enthusiastic incompetents: They’re running faster in the wrong direction. If they don’t know what they’re doing, or have the wrong idea of what they should be doing, their ‘will to win’ could destroy them.” Kurtz points to Apple Computer, which, twice in its history, came to the verge of extinction by using world-class exuberance to communicate a message that had little or nothing to do with the corporate world’s then-current needs.

  And yet . . . ah, the sheer power of that metaphor in a nation that simply loves (a) sports and (b) success. If (a) and (b) are combined, so much the better.

  Consider Boise Cascade Office Products (BCOP), which forms a significant part of the Boise Cascade empire, a $7 billion business that ranked number 248 on the Fortune 500 list in 2004. BCOP once used a chart of a football field to depict its progress toward its annual quota (the “goal line”) for sales to the rest of Fortune 500 America. The company mixed things up a bit by showing performance figures as “batting averages,” a baseball stat.3 But minor inconsistencies aside, the sports motif at BCOP extended beyond mere representations on a chart. The company taught new sales recruits to use sports imagery (“Think of yourself on the 20-yard line, about to kick the game-winning field goal!”). Specific sales plans drew from NFL playbooks, sometimes complete with Xs and Os. Members of a major-account team might be assigned the respective functions of quarterback, receiver, and offensive lineman, each function correlated to its closest customer-service analogue. (Administrative-support personnel are urged to view themselves as assistant coaches.)

  The BCOP model is increasingly common nowadays, thanks in part to the growing roster of firms and lone gunslingers who aggressively sell the sports/business linkage. Peak Performance Sports targets the Fortune 500 with such “outpatient” programs as “Applying Sports Psychology to the Business Team” and “The Psychology of Performance: Lessons I’ve Learned Working with Great Athletes.” Jeff Greenwald, formerly the world’s number one–ranked tennis player over age thirty-five, takes his “fearless performance” aria to the sales teams of corporate America via one- to six-month coaching programs.

  Greenwald, a clinical psychologist who also maintains a gen
eral practice, makes for an interesting case study. An irredeemably perky fellow who seems to preface every answer with “That’s a great question!” he says he achieved his number one ranking by “getting my mind straight” and that he now hopes to help major sales organizations do likewise. Greenwald represents what might be termed a “more enlightened” wing of sports motivators who preach the importance of de-emphasizing outcome and concentrating instead on process. Top achievers, he insists, must learn to filter out extraneous concerns, the first of those being excessive concern about winning or losing per se. “Whether you call it intensity or mental focus or being in the zone,” he says, “the bottom line is that you have to keep your mind on the specifics of what you need to be doing at that moment, and let the end result take care of itself.”

  Greenwald begins by interviewing key managers to diagnose the specific problem: a lack of teamwork, insufficient motivation among sales reps, or some other typical impediment to sales. He looks specifically at the nature of the coded messages being sent in communications between managers and reps. “Whether they realize it or not,” he says, repeating a common SHAM incantation, “they’re always communicating potent messages, to the staff and to themselves.” He then segues to five core competencies that affect performance: confidence, “self-regulation” (the ability to control destructive thoughts and emotions), resiliency (“you have to be able to weather the ups and downs”), team chemistry, and the aforementioned ability to “focus.” Greenwald teaches his pupils to “windshield-wipe away” negative self-talk. “People who exhibit poor performance tend to focus on the irrelevant at best, [the] counterproductive at worst,” he says. “For example, they’ll mind-read: Say they’re giving a presentation and somebody in the audience looks like he’s not interested. So they think, ‘He’s not paying attention to me. My speech is boring. I’m boring.’ And suddenly they’re out of their game. You need to windshield-wipe all that away.”