october-2009

078 BUSINESS
THE CLOSING BELL BY JACK GUINAN
BIZ TIP
PRESSED
FOR SUCCESS
For last-minute business
trips, quickly sorting,
folding and packing
clothes can be tough.
Enter the Luggage-Free Valet
from Garde Robe (www.garde
robeonline.com), a wardrobe
storage and valet service that
will keep a “satellite” closet for
your clothing and accessories in
a climate-controlled New York
City loft. You request items by
phone or on the website from
your cyber closet, and they’ll
ship them to your hotel in readyto-wear
condition (with a return
shipping label). So instead
of worrying about packing a
suitcase and wrinkling your
clothes, you can dedicate all
your energy to closing that deal.
(Rates start at $350 per month.)
GO MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2009
Playing to Win
HOW A LOCAL TV STATION
BECAME THE BIGGEST NAME
IN THE GAME
Faces painted in team colors, people
shouting at the top of their lungs for their
favorite players—sports fans are among
the most loyal and dedicated audiences in
the world. Yet back in 1979, if you weren’t
at the game, there were few options to
watch the action on TV, beyond mere
minutes of highlights on the evening news.
That all changed when a small group of
sports fanatics led by Bill Rasmussen began to show Connecticut college sports and New
England Whalers’ hockey on leased satellite space, creating the Entertainment and Sports
Programming Network, better known as ESPN. The network, which is celebrating its 30th
anniversary, has since become synonymous with sports media.
Anthony F. Smith, managing director of Leadership Research Institute, has been a
consultant at ESPN for more than 20 years and is the author of ESPN The Company: The
Story and Lessons Behind the Most Fanatical Brand in Sports. Here, Smith shares some of
the secrets behind its success.
Avoid the myth of single-person leadership.
“Leadership is really a shared phenomenon. One of the things that ESPN picked up pretty
quickly is that while each executive has been very strong in their own way, they needed to
surround themselves with other effective people who could fill in areas where they were
not as skilled.”
Hire passionate employees.
“Even if you manufacture cardboard boxes, [employees]
should be fanatical about something, whether it
be the job, the opportunities in the cardboard factory
or the fact that they have a great boss. If you’re working
for an unglamorous business and it’s hard to get
excited about the product or the content, you better
have great people.”
Take risks and reward the effort.
In 2006, ESPN launched the Mobile ESPN phone, a cell
phone that offered access to games and sports news at
all times. The business was more complicated than they
expected, and the Mobile ESPN phone was shut down
less than a year later.
“When [former CEO] George Bodenheimer said that we were closing down the phone
business, he also said, ‘This was a wonderful effort and that’s exactly what makes ESPN
what it is,’ and he really went out of his way to reward the effort. If you say, ‘I want people to
take risks,’ and then fire the guy if the outcome fails, it becomes clear how your organization
really feels about risk. ESPN really pushes all of its people to think outside the box.”
PRESSED FOR SUCCESS ILLUSTRATION BY TIM VIENCKOWSKI