top 10 ways to know that football is here

Are you ready for some football? Here are the top 10 ways to know it has officially arrived!

1. the bass drum corps from the high school - located more than a couple miles from your house - rattles your windows every morning during marching band practice - and then breaks crystal and knocks picture frames off the wall every other Friday night at home games;

2. you find out where your neighbors moved from or went to college as flags are attached to car windows or hung from front porches (or both) every Saturday morning - of note: you will know when their favorite team has lost a big game when the flag comes down immediately after the game;

3. no more curling tournaments; no more bocci specials; no more cricket highlights from the New Zealand versus Barbados match are shown on ESPN 2 through 25;

4. coaches at every level of football stand before a row of microphones and talk about how tough their opening game against a team that hasn't won a game in three years is going to be...with a straight face;

5. grown men who shouldn't take off their shirts in public take of their shirts in public with a big block letter painted on their chest;

6. television ratings for major league baseball plummet - and no one outside New York City and Boston and whoever lives in one of the cities that has a shot of playing them cares;

7. even the most long suffering of fans - i.e. Cincinnati Bengals fans (the team I grew up watching) - believe this year is going to finally be different for their team (until after the first game is a blowout loss);

8. the skinny kid who majors (or plans to major) in atomic and molecular astrophysics puts on a Tiger outfit and becomes a rock star to the home fans;

9. fantasy draft parties are held in corporate meeting rooms after work hours with a group of eleven people who bring enough pages of notes to fill War and Peace - and a twelfth person who plans to draft the kicker from his alma mater in the first round;

10. fans who have never played a down of football get into heated - and well reasoned - arguments over the merits of cover two versus bump and run; three-four versus four-three; i-formation versus the spread; punting or going for it; 60's Packers versus 80's 49ers versus the 21st Century Patriots; and the current head coach versus the coach who got fired from someone else's team last year.

Are you ready for some football?

a world without borders

I remember back in the late 90s and early 2000s when Borders outperformed Barnes & Nobel (B&N) on sales per square foot on a per store basis. B&N is doing fine. Borders is tottering on the edge of bankruptcy. What in the world happened over the past decade?

Borders canceled today's auction to keep a smaller but still significant retail concern going. (It's hard to have an auction when there are no bidders.) That means the 399 stores on the "short list" for a leaner and meaner Borders will be liquidated. Landlords and other creditors protested plans to save the company and are now protesting the plan to close the company's doors, so there may be some death throes - but sadly, it looks like the end is here.

Company President Mike Edwards said “We were all working hard towards a different outcome, but the headwinds we have been facing for quite some time, including the rapidly changing book industry, eReader revolution, and turbulent economy, have brought us to where we are now.”

If B&N is doing great - or at least holding their own in the same turbulent conditions - what happened to Borders?

A few quick and far from authoritative conjectures on my part include:

1. inventory management - every retailer has to carefully management open-to-buy dollars and inventory turns (how often a particular item sells out and has to be re-ordered) but from the publisher side of the table I thought Borders got too tight on order policies and left money on the table. A lot of people who are smarter than me will disagree with this. But I'm simple-minded enough to believe that if your business is book sales, you better make sure you have books on hand. Manage, yes. But don't squeeze the life out of your product.

2. too much emphasis on "new" - publishers and book retailers have to (and love to) create new titles, but the most successful companies don't forget about previous successes and find new ways to promote and re-introduce perennial sellers. This is the biggest advantage Amazon has - a catalog of 8 million titles, many nearly forgotten. B&N has had a much more robust in-house publishing program built around classics - and carried both more front and backlist titles per store. Even signage has indicated Border's over emphasis on the new. I once spent a couple hours studying the signs the chain had placed in it's "power corridor" in the front of their stores. Of 22 signs, 18 had the word "new" on it. I know "new" is a powerful word and I'm all for new titles. I LOVE new titles. I'm simply stating that in my opinion Borders didn't emphasize backlist enough.

3. the electronic revolution - Amazon introduced the Kindle, Apple the iPad, and Barnes & Nobel the Nook. Borders did a great job with email specials and coupons (there's that emphasis primarily on what's new again) - but never established itself as a destination for online sales of physical books or electronic books.

4. coffee - I think Borders coffee is fine but their cafes have never seemed to pack the punch of the "Starbucks branding" that B&N built their cafes around. Many people still don't know that the Barnes & Nobel Cafe is not a Starbucks!

It's easy for me to throw out ideas while good friends and a valuable publishing partner has fought for its life. Anything I've noted is not intended to be a casting of the "first stone." Retail in all categories is a tough and tumultuous world.

And bottom line, I feel rather sad about a world without Borders ...

print sales continue to drop for books

Publisher's Weekly just reported:

The total unit sales of print books sold through the outlets whose sales are captured by Nielsen BookScan dropped 10.2% in the six month period ended July 3, falling to 307.1 million. Among categories, the biggest decline came in adult fiction with units off 25.7%, while mass market paperback had the steepest decline among formats with units down 26.6% in the period. BookScan totals cover about 75% of the outlets where print books are sold.

Is this yet another signal that the book is dead or should at least be placed on the endangered species list?

As someone who makes a living in the book publishing industry I continue to maintain an optimistic position on the future of the book, in part, because I don't define the book as a physical object.

I see no reason for hand wringing. Publishers need to keep their focus on what they can control and what matters most: great content. The distribution medium matters but is not paramount. The music industry fought Napster (rightfully) and electronic distribution (wrongly) for most of a decade - and lost control of its own packaging and pricing. I think the book publishing industry has maintained a much healthier point of view toward electronic formats from day one.

I like physical books - actually, love is the better word for it - but I'm not going to lose sleep if we sell more books as electronic editions and kill fewer trees in the process. One of the biggest benefits of selling e-books for publishers is fewer dollars tied up in paper and ink with all the inventory management issues surrounding that. The amount of time it takes to recoup a dollar of the investment that goes into publishing a book is long enough without making the irreversible commitment to a print quantity that may not dovetail with real demand. (Many publishers have built financial models around a certain percentage of their unit sales coming from higher priced hard cover releases, and that is changing the assumptions for other formats, so I'm not saying this change makes things easier in all ways. Change is hard.)

I'm strictly describing what I think is - not proscribing what should be. And no matter how strong Amazon is as a bookseller, I still hope the market will support a robust brick and mortar retail environment. (Borders might not agree that is possilbe - but we should know if their reorganization is Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 within days - or even hours.)

My personal prediction - more gut than numbers at this point - is that five years from now 35-40% of all books sold will be e-books (digitally distributed), which would mean the majority of books consumed would be on the ink and paper medium. I also think that projection would leave sales space for a strong retail store presence for those chains and some exceptional independents that incorporate an e-book strategy into their overall sales mix.

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," said Mark Twain after hearing his obituary had been printed in the New York Journal.

The same can be said by and of the book.

different or alike?

One of my favorite weekly newsletters is written by Roy Williams of Wizard of Ads fame. If you are in sales and marketing and don't subscribe to the MondayMorningMemo, I highly recommend it. But this week's edition has life application beyond any advertising campaign you might be developing.

I think Mr. Williams' message has insight on how we interpret and present ourselves to the world as individuals - not just for businesses. His question of whether to "differentiate" or "conform" can be used to to evaluate how we see and relate to others. In other words - how we get along with those around us. The person who insists on always being different and "special" might take heed that there is a cost of not fitting in. The person who always conforms to his or her surroundings might be reminded that each of us have a uniqueness accompanied by gifts that are meant to season the world around us.

But I'll let the true Wizard speak from his observations as an advertiser.

Differentiate or Conform?

Chronic problems in business are usually the result of binary thinking. “It’s either this way or that way. It can’t be both.”

Strangely, the answer is almost always “both.”

“Should I try to attract the price-driven (transactional) customer, or should I go for the (relational) customer who cares about something other than price?”

Both. Create and schedule ads that speak convincingly to the question of price. Create and schedule other ads that speak of important matters beyond price. Just don’t try to do both in the same ad.

“Should I manage with strict policies, procedures, methods and systems, or should I empower my employees to make decisions on their own?”

Both. Systematize the 90 percent of your company’s activities that are recurrent so that your employees have the freedom to humanize and customize the 10 percent of your activities that are ever-changing and unusual. A company without freedoms is a sweatshop. A company without policies, procedures, methods and systems is a country club for unproductive employees.

“Should I promote an exclusive brand and risk the manufacturer betraying me by allowing my competitor to sell that brand for which I’ve created all the demand, or should I create my own in-house brand so that I can remain in control of it?”

Both. You need the credibility of established brands to lend strength to the new brand you will introduce. Advertise both, but never in the same ad.

“Won’t this make me seem unfocused?”

No. You must get on board with proven procedures. You must also do your own thing and go your own direction. It’s not only possible that you do both, it is essential.

Mechanics across Europe began building cars in 1886 and each time they built a car it was different. More than 2,000 different garages built and sold cars one-at-a-time before Henry Ford’s 1913 introduction of the first moving assembly line employing conveyor belts. Henry popularized the concept of interchangeable parts. It was efficient. It also made him the richest man in the world. By 1923 Henry Ford was personally earning $264,000 a day. He was declared a billionaire by the Associated Press.

More than 17,000,000 Model T’s rolled off Henry’s assembly line and you could have any color you wanted as long as it was black. The inefficiency of building cars one-at-a-time forced the other 2,000 garages to sell their cars at about $2,500 apiece while the price of a reliable, new Model T was only $849.

Soon the other carmakers got on board and America became an automotive Wonderland.

But we always take a good thing too far. Fifty years later, General Motors decided to take this idea to the next level. “Instead of designing 5 different brands each year and retooling our machinery to build Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Buicks and Cadillacs, why not just put a different interior package and grille and taillights in the same, basic car and sell that car under 5 different names?”

A Chevy Cavalier is a Pontiac Sunbird is an Oldsmobile Firenza is a Buick Skyhawk is a Cadillac Cimarron.

A Chevy Nova is a Pontiac Ventura is an Oldsmobile Omega is a Buick Apollo is a Cadillac Seville.

A Chevy Caprice is a Pontiac Catalina is an Olds 98 is a Buick Electra is a Cadillac DeVille.

On the surface, this looks like exactly the same idea that made Henry Ford rich. The problem with the “platform engineering” introduced by GM in the late 1970s is that it eroded the distinctiveness of their brands. Two decades later GM was forced to close Oldsmobile and a few years after that, Pontiac fell as well. Analysts speculate whether Buick or Cadillac will be next.

Conformity is essential or you will not be efficient. Differentiation is essential or you will not be special.

the necessary compulsion of excercise

On Saturday morning I take off on my bicycle with a couple thousand of my closest friends - including Lance Armstrong and some of his Team RadioShack teammates - on the Harpeth River Ride. I am doing the 62-mile course with mixed emotions. (Not sure how far Lance is riding or what his emotional state is.)

On one hand I love riding my bike and I see the benefit - or more accurately the necessity - of riding to get in better shape (another way of saying, "need to lose 20 pounds ... again"). On the other hand, after a long winter hibernation and then an early spring surgery, I'm not in the best shape of my life, a condition that both motivates and discourages the obvious cure. So I know full well that not all of the 62 miles promise to be fun. In the short time I've had to get ready for this modest ride I've discovered that after about 25 miles the gentle rolling hills of Middle Tennessee are not always so gentle.

I was sifting through some excerpts from Albert Schweitzer's Africa Notebooks and stumbled on this relevant observation the great missionary and humanitarian made as he conversed with the natives of Africa. They were curious as to the differences between themselves and the people of Europe where Schweitzer was born.

So I go on to tell them that in Europe people row for pleasure, a statement followed by uncontrollable laughter. ... I don't attempt to make clear to them what sport is. The conditions under which they live in so many ways compel them to use their physical forces and take exercise to a greater extent than they like, that they cannot understand at all how people can do so except under compulsion.

We may have a choice whether to exercise or not, but in our corner of the world where food is abundant and many of us ply a trade that is sedentary, it's not surprising we put on jogging shoes or head to the gym or hop on a bike under a certain compulsion, too.

So will I ride for pleasure or compulsion on Saturday? I'm telling myself it is for pleasure. But halfway through I may not be able to fool myself any longer. As is so often the case in life, the answer is a definite and resounding, yes.

lessons after a loss

On January 12,2011, the bus carrying the Mount Union College wrestling team hit a snow plow while driving in wintery conditions. Thankfully no students were seriously hurt though there were a few minor injuries ... but tragically the team trainer was killed.

A friend who grew up with the Mount Union coach, Mark Hawald, forwarded the following public email that he sent out to his contact list. Even if you know nothing about amateur wrestling and aren't particularly into sports, he has distilled some incredible lessons when faced with a loss, big or small. Hope you are able to glean and apply some truths from this email as you say a prayer for all those intimately connected with the tragedy.

The experience the Mount Union Wrestling Family went through Tuesday night was something I hope no other coach ever has deal with.  On the way home from a dual meet, our team’s bus was involved in an accident which took the life of our trainer and friend, Dan Gorman.  My assistant coach suffered a broken wrist, and thankfully there were no other injuries.
 
This has been a difficult and confusing time for both my team and me.   Dan was more than a trainer to us.  He was like our fifth coach.  He attended all of our practices and home meets, and some of our away meets.  Dan was a mentor to me and my wrestlers and always had advice on how to be a better person, so I want to use this experience as Dan would, as a way to help others grow and improve their own lives.  I hope I can pass on what I have learned to others and that they will not have to experience anything like this to learn such valuable lessons.
 
I have learned to better appreciate the people who deserve my appreciation.  I thought Dan was an amazing trainer.  I often referred to him as “the smartest person I know.”  His mat side diagnosis was usually the same as the one given by a specialist weeks later after looking an X-Ray or MRI.  Beyond his profession, Dan provided incredible life lessons and insight to anyone who was willing to listen.  He made my job as a coach easier because I knew that my wrestlers would become better people after spending just a few minutes with him.  I appreciated Dan for everything he did for this team, but I don’t know how clear I made that to him.  As my wrestlers discussed winning a conference title to honor Dan, I interrupted and said the best way to honor Dan is to model ourselves after him and become better people.  We need to better appreciate the people who deserve our appreciation, let them know how much they mean to us, say thank you for the impact they have made on our lives, and try to be the Dan Gorman is someone else’s life.
 
I have learned that the rewards of wrestling do not always show on the mat.  Tuesday was the worst moment in my coaching career, but also my proudest.  I often leave practice frustrated.  If my guys don’t work as hard as they should or can’t figure something out I ask myself what am I doing wrong as a coach or what is wrong with my guys that they are not doing exactly what they should.  I learned Tuesday night that I have succeeded as a coach and that my wrestlers are exactly the men that I want them to be.  When faced with a crisis, these young men were true champions.  The lessons they have learned from this sport were apparent on Tuesday night.  We had a goal to save our dear friend.  They worked together and did everything they could.  Everyone played an important role.  Those with “medical” experience immediately put their attention on Dan, some ventured out into the cold to set up flares, waive down vehicles, and assess the situation of the bus, some comforted the girls (our managers) who were shook up from the accident, and the rest gathered close to stay warm and started praying.  I hope other coaches too will learn that although our guy does not always get his hand raised, we are playing a crucial role in developing real-world champions.
 
I have learned is that the brotherhood known as wrestling is the one of the strongest, most dependable, and most honorable groups of individuals on this planet.  The support that this team has received has been unbelievable.  I have received support from across the state and across the country.  From high schools and colleges.  From all divisions.  Our biggest competitors have become our biggest supporters.  I lost count early yesterday of how many programs have extended their support.  I have seen the worst situation bring out the absolute best in people.  We decided to still hold our tournament we had scheduled for Sunday at the request of Dan’s wife.  She said that carrying on our lives and acting no different is what Dan would have wanted.  I have had multiple coaches tell me that they would be willing to run the tournament or provide other help.  Words cannot express what this support means to the team and to me.  Wrestlers who quit my team for whatever reason, were waiting for us when we returned to campus to offer their support.  I hope that people reading this will not wait for the worst situation to bring out their best.
 
I hope this message can be valuable to anyone who has suffered any type of loss and that in sharing this message, others can grow from this as the members of my team have and continue to.
 
Lastly, here are a few specific messages to different groups involved in our sport…
 
WRESTLING PARENTS
Your children are in the hands of the finest men on the planet.  Every coach I know in this sport is a great man and will do anything for your son.  Wrestling coaches will try to make a better wrestler, but will definitely make a better man.

WRESTLERS
Cherish every moment you have in this sport.  You have chosen to surround yourself among the greatest peers in your teammates and the greatest role models in your coaches.  Practice is tough.  Cutting weight is tough.  Losing is tough.  But so is life.  What you learn in this sport will be the most valuable lessons you will learn in life.

COACHES
As we waited for the emergency crew to arrive, I was holding blankets over Dan and rubbing his arms trying to keep him warm.  While our student trainer was trying to get him back, I started talking to Dan.  I was saying “Stay tough” and “You can do this” and “Dig Deep” and other things like that.  I caught myself and realized that these were the same things I say to my wrestlers when times get tough in a match or at practice.  I was looking forward to having a good laugh about it with Dan and my team when he would make his return.  I will not have the opportunity to have this reunion, but this did make me realize that in a crisis situation, I fell back on the wrestling coach that I am.  This situation has taught me that our value to these young men is greater than I could have ever imagined.  Don’t forget who you are and the impact you have on so many people’s lives.