Raising your game
I don’t follow basketball regularly—I’m more of a football person myself—but I’ve been following the news about the NBA referee cheating investigation in Sports Illustrated. For those of you who haven’t been, here’s the short version: the FBI is investigating whether a former NBA referee manipulated point totals through suspect calls and conspired with gamblers who had ties to organized crime. This is not something you want to have happen in your professional sports league, to put it mildly.
This week, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was quoted in another Sports Illustrated column as saying to his officiating department, in reaction to the problems the NBA is facing: “Let’s be thankful it wasn’t us. But let’s react like it was.”
What a great statement. When a competitor (or even a noncompetitive organization) faces a major crisis, it can be easy to bask in the schadenfreude and think, “That won’t happen to us.” Instead, we should all see situations like that as opportunities to raise our own game. What should that other organization have done to avoid or mitigate the problems they’re dealing with? If we’re not already doing those things, how soon can we start?
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