Bill Simmons (ESPN’s The Sports Guy) is a sportswriter who has taken it upon himself to keep the owners, GMs and commissioners of the sports world honest. He’s always pounding home the fact that most people in charge are more interested in supporting the status quo than they are in finding and implementing innovative solutions; they would rather not get fired than build championship teams and superior leagues—even when the status quo actually means deterioration. In May he built a (slightly) tongue-in-cheek campaign for himself to fill the vacant Minnesota Timberwolves GM position.
Simmons laid out the reasons for his candidacy in an interview with Minneapolis Star Tribune writer Michael Rand. The campaign included a Facebook page with 2,000+ fans, a reported 12,000 emails from fans to Timberwolves President Chris Wright pleading with him to hire Simmons, and a barrage of innovative ideas he sent out via Twitter. In fact, that’s where he launched his campaign.
There was a real groundswell that embraced his candidacy. It was all over the blogs, forums, and social media sites. There was something intriguing about the idea. Not just for a gimmick, but something about him that almost made you believe he could do the job. Listen to the first few minutes of the B.S. Report where Bill makes his pitch for the job.
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What is it that sets him apart? He has ideas. They’re not half-baked ideas, and they’re not generic ideas. He’s amassed a huge amount of knowledge about the NBA, its history, and what it takes to put together a winning team (his epic 700 page book is due out this fall.) He has a fertile mind that churns out ideas at a non-stop pace.
This isn’t a man who would make the same old decisions as the last guy.
The strongest element of his argument is that he isn’t bound by fear of failure or losing his job. He already has a successful career as a writer. This would allow him to focus himself completely on solving the puzzle of how to build a championship franchise.
Would Simmons’ knack for using ingenuity have translated to a real ability to run a franchise? Or would this just be a ploy to promote his next book? I don’t know. But it sure did make for an engaging story.
Read Part I and Part II of the Ingenuity series.
Tags: ingenuity, philosophy
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