Class V

Goals for Leaders

Joe Torre turned down the Yankees' contract offer today.  Analysts suggest the reason that the Torre Era is ending is because Torre balked at the fact that the new, 2008 - 2009 contract would contain several performance based compensation clauses that his previous, 2005 - 2007 contract did not.

From the Sports Illustrated article:

Torre made $7.5 million this year, the final season of a $19.2 million, three-year contract. His new deal would have included substantial bonuses for each round of the playoffs the team reached.

"We felt we needed to go to a performance-based mode," Levine said. "We thought it was very fair. It clearly was at the top of the market, but we respect Joe's decision."

--

Just 10 days ago, the Yankees were bounced out of the first round of the playoffs for the third straight year.

It is important to include that last sentence, because the issue for the Yankees these last few years has not been their regular season performance or inability to get to the postseason, but to close the deal, as it were.

Athletes often have all kinds of performance incentives written into their contracts, in part because sports provides a context in which goal attainment can easily be measured, in such a way that all interested parties agree.  One either hits 40 home runs or completes 12 sacks ... or not.

So why not coaches?

I've been following the Torre contract saga not only because I am a passionate Red Sox fan but because this issue of performance-based compensation is one we often struggle with, as venture capitalists.  Success in business can be measured nearly as objectively as success in sports, e.g., 12 paying customers with current year revenues greater than $10M each, so I am all for it. 

Seems straightforward enough, so where are the struggles?

• Metrics.  I've seen offer letters often refer to attainment of goals mutually agreed upon by the supervisor and the employee but rarely have I seen a time limit placed on when such a discussion needs to occur.  In my opinion, this should be within 60 days of the employees' starting date.  Enough time for the employee to understand the business and what is feasible, not so long that the employee is working towards goals that the supervisor does not agree are in the best interest of the company.  Bonuses that do not tie to specific metrics - and I would say I have seen this to be the case in a surprising number of offer letters or employment agreements - make zero sense to me.  And like any other set of metrics, the more specific, the better.
• Compensation components, specifically cash versus equity.  Some of my industry colleagues feel that bonuses should not be paid out in cash until a startup is cash flow positive.  While I personally find this perspective to be extreme, I do agree that until a startup is cash flow positive, a greater percentage of the bonus should be paid out in equity than what I currently see in most of the companies with which I have worked (often, there is no equity component to the bonus compensation).

Coaches and athletes on the same team should be financially motivated in similar ways.  Although I am personally a big fan of Joe Torre the gentleman (for I am as much a baseball fan as I am a Red Sox fan), my humble opinion is that he was wrong to decline the Yankees' offer because of the performance-based nature of it. 

Now, on the other hand, if the real reason he declined it is because he is sick of being constantly hung out to dry by the rest of the Yankee leadership organization ... that I could not only understand, but completely agree with.

Technorati Tags: Joe Torre, performance based compensation

Update / Personal

Know it's been a while.  Nothing like moving two time zones and starting a new job to make one feel a bit overwhelmed.  So there will be (at least) two blog entries this week: this one will have some random musings generated from my personal life as of late, and the other will contain random musings on the work front.

Random personal musing one: the new single by Maroon 5 is absolutely brilliant.  As is the video.  Both the song and the video captures a vibe I've been into lately: modern meets retro (funk).

Random personal musing two: online dating is a strange, bizarre world.  I've only begun to take baby steps into the whole chaos, and I am certainly not going to post updates on a blog.  But I've got three PSA's (Public Service Announcements) to make here:

1. Men shouldn't describe themselves as attractive or good looking if they are 5'9" and 300 pounds.  Photos with mullets are also suspicious.
2. Unstable girls shouldn't hack into their alleged boyfriends' e-mail accounts and then proceed to send unsolicited, multiple e-mails to women with whom the alleged boyfriends have been corresponding.
3. Men dating unstable girls shouldn't be corresponding with women on dating sites.

Random personal musing three: Injuring your shoulder just before you move to be next to the Pacific Ocean (so that you can surf more frequently) is both ironic and painfully frustrating.

Random personal musing four: New York is a wonderful place to visit, but I never want to live there.  Was honored to be included this past weekend at a world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, for a film produced by my good friend SC.  Reminded me that friends are really one of life's greatest blessings: children will eventually grow out of the house, most of us don't meet our spouses until later in life, but some of us are fortunate to have friends we've known before all that and hopefully afterwards too.

Random personal musing five: Daisuke Matsuzaka is not pitching like a $100M player.  Despite this, the Red Sox are beating the snot out of the Yankees, which would normally make me quite smug ... except that it's April.

Technorati Tags: Daisuke Matsuzaka, Maroon 5, New York, online dating

A Coaching Legend's "Exit Interview"

Some close friends already know this, but I was this [picture pinching one's thumb and index finger together] close to enrolling in a Ph.D. program in organizational behavior, upon my MBA graduation several years ago.  The research I was most interested in conducting was the application of sport coaching principles to corporate leadership. 

And the individual I had most clearly in my mind, when formulating all of my initial hypotheses, was Bill Parcells.  Not that I consider him the greatest sport coach of all time ... I don't even consider him the greatest football or NFL coach of all time.  But he struck me as a clear data point that there is no one perfect leader for all situations ... but rather, specific types of leaders for specific types of situations, e.g., turnaround artists.

In any case, Parcells claims to be retiring finally from coaching. Whether this retirement sticks, who knows?  On his way out, he did not do a final regular media interview.  However, he did participate in a lengthy radio interview with a New York station yesterday, and I thought it worth posting the link here.  For those interested in leadership or coaching, there are too many nuggets in the interview for me to attempt to quote only a few here.

Technorati Tags: Bill Parcells, coaching, leadership, Dallas Cowboys

Brilliant: Lorena Ochoa

Golf is not my thing.  At all.

So until this week, I had no idea who Lorena Ochoa was.

But as a female athlete, I am compelled to draw attention to this year's AP Female Athlete of the Year. 

Apparently, Ochoa took home every significant LPGA award this year, unseating Annika Sörenstam (I have heard of her) as the number one female golfer in the world.  Even as she failed to win her first major championship.  According to the experts, this is just a matter of time.

What I find particularly compelling about Ochoa's story is how proud she is of her nationality, as detailed in this quote from USA Today:

Intensely proud of her heritage, Ochoa reaches out to the Mexicans she sees at golf tournaments, many of them working on maintenance crews, all of them stopping to watch whenever she goes by.

"I'm very proud to be Mexican, and every time I see some Mexicans on the course, it could be the workers, or Mexicans that live here ... it gives me extra motivation," she said.  "It makes me want to do things better and play good for them."

Would have never picked golf to showcase ethnic minorities such as Tiger Woods (who, coincidentally was this year's AP Male Athlete of the Year) and now Lorena Ochoa front and center, but it's all good.

Not that any of this will ever compel me to pick up a driver.  Like I said, it's just not my thing.

Technorati Tags: Lorena Ochoa, golf

Philosophy Is ...

... the talk on a cereal box.  That's a line from a 1990 Edie Brickell & New Bohemians song and I never thought I would refer to it in the context of riding (snowboarding) but here goes ...

Will be heading to the mountains in the coming week to celebrate my birthday by getting some early season riding in.  Adding to the list of environmentally sensitive sporting goods manufacturers from the previous blog entry, am super stoked about my new board (left) from Arbor Sports.

Also purchased Burton Escapade bindings, which came with the following warning on the box (bold sentences and ellipses are from Burton, not yours truly):

Keep it rad. Look both ways before you cross the street.  Bathtubs are slippery.  Do not stand on the top step of a ladder.  Life has risks ... snowboarding is one of them.  These are the best bindings in the world, but they are not designed to release.  The best protection you have is yourself.  Read the instruction manual ...  Learn to ride.  Accept the risks you can handle without putting others at risk.

Who knew so much of my own personal philosophy would be summed up on a box in almost exactly the way Edie Brickell described, but there you go.

Technorati Tags: risk, Arbor snowboards, Burton, philosophy, Edie Brickell

Silence is Deafening

As of 3:30 PM CT August 5, no word from Lance Armstrong on the results of Floyd Landis' B sample, which were made known overnight.

From Rafael Palmeiro to Justin Gatlin, it is clear that cheating has become synonymous with elite athletics.  As a passionate fan of sport from both a participant and fan perspective, I am disappointed even as I am not surprised. 

It is likely impossible to stem the tide of massive commercial pressures such as product endorsements and appearance fees that are, in my opinion, at the root cause of this phenomenon.   Decades ago, when most US consumers had no idea what the Tour de France was, no less who won it ... performance enhancement consisted of coffee and cigarettes.

I know this perspective is naive - and perhaps reflective of my useless Philosophy degree - but as the stakes are seemingly raised, why do our definitions of right and wrong become cloudier?  Do ethics mean anything at all, if they are observed only when materially convenient? 

One of the reasons I love athletics is that there are so many life lessons to be drawn from not so much the result as from the journey to arrive there.  Easily achieved results are just not as rewarding as hard earned ones.  My worst water polo season, from a statistics perspective, was clearly my senior year in prep school.   But in many ways it was, by far, the most rewarding time in my entire career, through college and beyond.  No need to get into the details of why here, but my point being that it is not so much that the end may or may not justify the means ... but that the means in and of itself is inherently more interesting and valuable in any case.

Technorati Tags: Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis, cheating, sports

Jello and Lost Goggles

Since I know ST is reading this from NC, I thought I'd take a stroll down memory lane.  Went to my first age group swim meet today in I don't know how many years ... 20?  Here is what has not changed:

• Pixie Stix and Jello are still the food of champions, carbs be damned
• Relays are more fun than individual events
• The toughest parent volunteer job is keeping the bullpen organized and moving
• There isn't enough Xanax in the world for certain hypercompetitive swimming parents
• Goggles and towels may as well be disposable, for the number of times they are lost or misplaced

Wanted to take this occasion to give a shout out to my cousins NF and KF: K's breaststroke technique has improved considerably since we began to work on it a couple of months ago, and N did his first real dive starts today.  Great job, guys! 

Technorati Tag: swimming

Brilliant: Amelie Mauresmo

Those who have known me for a while know that I have been a huge fan of Amelie Mauresmo since she first burst on the scene in 1999 as an unseeded 19 year old who made the finals of the Australian Open. These friends ridiculed me as Mauresmo failed in every Grand Slam since to even make another final, no less win one.

Still ... that one handed backhand! Those athletic instincts at the net! That physique, which I consider one of the most perfect among all current world class female athletes!

Well, my faith in Mauresmo was finally rewarded this past weekend when she won the Australian Open in her first Grand Slam final appearance since that remarkable run back in 1999. As a measure of time, when Mauresmo came out as a lesbian during her first Australian Open final in 1999, it was major news and other players such as Martina Hingis were quoted as calling her "half a man". In 2005, thankfully, her sexual orientation has hardly been mentioned in the coverage of her victory.

When I was a NCAA Division I Head Coach, one of the things I found most rewarding was spotting the potential in a high school player and seeing her blossom at the collegiate level. I imagine this gratification is not much different than what venture capitalists enjoy when their startups make it big, although I will admit that I am too new in the field to know about this firsthand. But in any case, my joy in Mauresmo's victory reminded me of the importance of recognizing potential when no one else sees it, and keeping one's faith when everyone seems to lose it.

Technorati Tags: Amelie Mauresmo, Australian Open

Wisdom from the Yoda of Baseball

I enjoy sports of all kinds, but am particularly in love with baseball.  To that end, we are blessed here in Austin to be living among a true coaching legend, someone who I often consider the Yoda of Baseball.  Augie Garrido has compiled a 1,542-717-8 record (.682 winning percentage) in his 37 years of collegiate coaching, which have included College World Series ("CWS") titles in 1979, 1984 and 1995 with Cal State Fullerton and most recently in 2002 and 2005 with The University of Texas (Austin).  That record in and of itself is quite simply the best.  But what floors me about Coach Garrido are the methods he has used to achieve that success.  He is more Dalai Lama than Vince Lombardi, and more cerebral than most professors  found in a traditional university lecture hall.  Above all else, he is the consummate teacher to his fortunate student-athletes, and I mean teacher in the reverent sense of my Japanese heritage, as in sensei.

This morning, Bucky Godbolt and Erin Hogan spent an hour with Coach Garrido during their local morning sports talk radio show on KVET-AM 1300 "The Zone".

• "Remove the prize, and focus on the process."  I found this particularly relevant when there are entrepreneurs today whose revenue models (if they even have one) seem frighteningly familiar to the "Built to Flip" plans seen during the first Internet bubble.  Along this theme, Coach Garrido spoke of pressure moments in the following way: don't play for the outcome, but simply focus on what your specific job is at that particular moment.
• Speaking to important weeks on the calendar or in the season, Coach Garrido observes that a team of individuals is a highly intelligent entity.  The team is already aware of the importance of the "must win" game.  Therefore, the best coaches do not treat the week leading into the game any differently, for human beings by nature tend to function best in familiar environments.  Directors and executives may find this wisdom particularly difficult in the final days leading to the close of a critical quarter, but that does not diminish its value.
• Coach Garrido addressed a question regarding the absence of African American talent within baseball.  He stated quite simply that "diversity is best".  Conditions for achieving this diversity are challenging: whereas football is given 85 scholarships and men's basketball is given 13, baseball (which carries a 25 man roster into the CWS) is only given 11.7.  (source: Article 15 of the 2005-06 NCAA Division I Manual)  But Coach Garrido observes that the restrictions are the same for all teams, and that "our job is to solve the problems, not give in to them."

I cannot claim to be the first to draw an analogy between Yoda and a baseball coach: see this amusing Boston.com feature on Curt Schilling (Luke) and Terry Francona (Yoda).

The entire interview with Coach Garrido is available in .wma format here on the KVET website.