The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry Reprint Edition

As someone who both works in the sports industry and who has taken a number of sports marketing courses, I was greatly impressed with the book. The authors do a great job of explaining intricate marketing concepts in a casual, easy-to-read style. The eight tenets of the book can relate well to almost any entity, whether in sports or not. Additionally, the authors do a terrific job in incorporating case studies into the chapters to make their points come alive.

The follow-up book to The Elusive Fan by the same author.Updated for 2014.

An essential text for the sports business world. Case studies/examples drive home the concepts and frameworks presented.

as expected

For starters: I spend a good chunk of my leisure time discussing the topics covered in this book. I am a moderator on a sports forum where the hottest topics are those pertaining to team identity and brand development. (It doesn't help that the team in question has had an incredibly bad season.) Being a competitive sort myself, I am always trying to come up with superb insights. Since the material in Sports Strategist is based on courses taught at Northwestern University, I had hoped that the book would help me take my moderating game to the next level.Instead, I found a little bit of Good to Great, a little bit more of a marketing textbook with occasional forays into intro statistics courses, leavened with lots of fascinating anecdotes that are more entertaining than informative. For example, the first chapter is entitled "A Winning Business." Good title for a first chapter of a sports book! But the opening story focuses on the conversion of an old Indiana synagogue into a team store for a minor league baseball team. Cute, but I'm not clear that it has anything to do with the rest of the chapter. The book is full of these moments, as if someone spent a year or two clipping stories and then just stuffed them into the manuscript without adhering to any kind of framework. (And there is a framework. It just doesn't get a lot of respect.)For example, there's a chapter on dealing with crises, entitled "Crafting a Crisis Blueprint." Sounds good, right? The team I support has endured a few crises; how should they have been handled? The chapter begins with a few stories of various crises (Black Sox, individual players who cause trouble), then defines the components of crises, then lurches into a section entitled "The Causes of Today's 'Crises of Crises'," where it lost me completely because there are a couple of stories about baseball players who were adept at self promotion. We learn that Ted Williams liked chocolate milkshakes. Wait! Is a page missing? Isn't this the crisis chapter? Soon the narrative returns to a discussion of price gouging in New Zealand rugby stores. Bad policy, but crisis? Next, we're on to Twitter, and then there's a little box describing Pat Summitt's early onset Alzheimer's, which is sort of related. This wild ride of a chapter concludes with a primer on handling press conferences during a crisis. Nice way to conclude; still not sure how we got there.There are three authors' names on the cover, and they thank another 10 colleagues, all professors, for their contributions. Somewhere in this written-by-committee-kitchen-sink there's a real, useful book. But the reader is left to her own devices to dig it out from underneath the mass of fascinating but irrelevant tales. A blueprint for a developing leader this is not. Entertaining, yes, but it could have and should have been so much more.

There are already quite a number of reviews that cover the whole book very well, so I thought I would touch on a few of the sections that I found particularly interesting.The chapter of building a narrative is useful far beyond just the sports field. It starts by assessing the audience and deciding if they are superfans, avids, interactives, watchers, casuals or unengaged. You then decide between various types of storylines: narrative, organic, directed, shaped, improvisational, or if you should use multiple storylines. I found this books categorization of various types of "plots" useful. These are: the underdog, the comeback kid, the incredible feat, the Santa Claus, the rivalry, the tradition, the love of the game, the great sacrifice. This book offers explanations and examples of these plots and expands on how to use characterization and setting to tell the story.The chapter on crisis discusses the common parts of many crisis: allegations, uncertainty about the details of what happened, lack of control over the diffusion of the story, a person or organization is immediately put on the defensive, they also often lack the ability to choose the circumstances of the response, and the public often assumes you are guilty. This book adapts Steven Finks crisis management stages to the sports field, looking at these 4 stages: provocation, action, management, and post-crisis. Some actual crisis are examined, then the book is back to deciding how to handle a crisis that you are involved in. Response choices include: denial, mortification, evasion of responsibility, reducing the offensiveness of the event, and corrective actions. The book points out that doing the wrong thing may work against you in the long run. SO GLAD they take that stance. There is even an entire chapter on ethics.If you are in the business of sports, this book is well worth the read!