The following is a guest article by Suzi Alvarez, Director of Brand Marketing, Chat Sports.
When Joe Lacob took the reigns at the Warriors, he tore down the walls. This is not metaphor or hyperbole. He physically gutted an office building, installing clear glass walls. Transparency and openness: personified and put on display.
When he sat down with Dan Gilbert, Cleveland Cavaliers owner, last Friday at Chat Sports: The Minds Behind the Game, it was the first time in history that two owners publicly broke bread together during the NBA Finals. And regarding the formula for success, they couldn’t agree more. The two business moguls and championship mavens whittled winning philosophy down to one word: connectivity.
“Culture drives everything. It drives every single thing that happens.” Normally, you might accuse Gilbert of stating the obvious — the subject is a tad over-hyped— but not when he’s revealing the secret, fatal flaw within every NBA franchise. That flaw is the intentional wall erected between the business and basketball departments. And whether a leader breaks it down with a demolition crew or communal flights out to every game, a culture of connectivity is the secret behind the trophies.
Lacob described staff reaction when the walls came down at the Warriors’ office. “People freaked out and said, ‘No, people can see our stuff!’”
Gilbert quipped back, “Yeah, what’s so great about your stuff?”
When one of capitalism’s reigning kingpins leaps over materialism in a single bound, the room goes silent. And you realize the weight of this insider secret — transparency trumps all.
It’s not just physical barriers that need to fall. When asked how technology was changing the future of sports, neither Lacob nor Gilbert rattled off a list of high-tech wearables or advancements in analytics. They each named the interconnectedness of the sports community. On the wave of the future, that’s the crest — not the hardware or software itself.
The anecdotes rained down: one son paying closer attention to Twitter than the live game itself; another absorbed in the (admittedly dismal) fantasy performance of Ben Tate and Josh Gordon, rather than the score of the actual Browns game; real-time stats embedded in arena infrastructure, right at a fan’s fingertips. The fluid flow of information and our collective ability to share it — that’s how technology is changing sports.
“What you learn from your customers, whether it is sports or anything, that to me is the best part of social and mobile.” Lacob explained. “You have your tentacles, [and] if you use them right, you can get that live customer feeling that you can’t get if you’re sitting in an ivory tower somewhere.”
So, when you think about your own business and your own brand, ask yourself: are you connected? Have you created a transparent culture that unites your team? Are you fully tapping into the living, breathing consumer organism that we call social media? Have the walls come down?
Pardon me as I wax nostalgic, but connectedness means a lot to us here at Chat Sports, too. In a world where sitting in Dad’s lap for a morning read of the sports page is a thing of the distant past, we dream of connecting fans to their teams and families — near and far. We hope to connect that displaced Cleveland fan with every Cavs blog back home and to let the entire Warriors faithful share hometown pride as one. So, to make a historic day for Chat Sports & Minds Behind the Game even better, both Gilbert and Lacob spoke our mission statement right back to us.
“With culture and the building of an organization, this has been one of thehardest things I’ve ever done,” Lacob revealed to the crowd, in a rare moment of vulnerability and weakness. But we’re pretty sure for these two brilliant minds and for you, too, it’s the most rewarding, as well.
Watch the full 45-minute panel discussion below and follow @ChatSports on Twitter for information in the upcoming Minds Behind the Game events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City.