Strategic clarity and sports metaphors

Some of the more lucid CEO comments to surface recently (from any industry) came from Joe Loggia, CEO of Advanstar Communications, and Gary Marshall, CMP Media’s president and CEO. At the recent ABM Spring Meeting, Loggia tackled the challenge of developing a realistic strategy and translating that to the team. We all know strategy and reality are often at odds: the former being a well orchestrated forward pass, the latter is the dropped forward pass, or, often, the interception. What makes Loggia’s take so solid is that he realizes too many balls in the air will affect the completion percentage. He calls it “strategic clarity.”

“You can’t tell your team to build for long-term growth and ask them, 45 days later, ‘what’s happening this quarter,’” Loggia told 300-plus business media leaders in Boca Raton. Loggia’s stance is that a team needs strategic clarity for direction. But, so do team leaders. The strategic direction can muddy for even top level executives when they address the wrong issues, and one can’t expect team success if that clarity isn’t – well – clear.

   

Marshall’s take is that strategy can easily be lost you don’t have the right players, or if you don’t know who your players are. “It’s one thing to have vision, but you also need to have a team that can deliver,” said Marshall. “Make sure you have the right person in the right place at the right time.”

In this fast-paced environment, it is easy to forget about strategic clarity and jump to the score (poorly hidden metaphor for bottom line). So, before adding the stats, ensure the game plan and team are in order.

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Comments

[paul conley]

Hi folks,
I wanted to let you know that I'm a little disappointed in the way MediaPace has begun. There's a detailed post on my B2B journalism blog. I'd ask that you take a look.
In the meantime, I have to say I really dislike the post about "Strategic clarity and sports metaphors."
I spend a fair amount of time trying to convince B2B journalists not to use sports metaphors in their writing. Such writing, which requires that a reader be a sports fan, seldom adds clarity. Such writing also tends to exclude readers from other nations.
Perhaps worst of all -- for reasons that I don't understand -- sports metaphors lead to mixed metaphors.
Thus in your post about strategic clarity you have someone talking about forward passes (football) and having too many balls in the air (juggling.)
Sports metaphors are for lazy writers and lazy speakers. They tend to slow the pace until all sense is drained from a sentence, and the struggle to continue the metaphor leads to typos like this: "The strategic direction can muddy for event top level executives and one can’t expect team success if that clarity isn’t – well – clear."
I'd love to know what Loggia and Marshall think about strategy. But your post didn't tell me.

[Martha Spizziri]

I have to agree somewhat with Paul Conley's comment. I would have liked to know more about how to identify the key players and how to get the necessary people to buy in--or how to balance long-term strategy with the need for near-term results.