How Do You Gain Support for Selling Big-Time College Sports?

As discussed, the financial valuation for selling big-time sports may be complex and even creative, but it’s straightforward in the sense that it’s contained and largely technical—a combination of structured and semistructured problem. Persuading people that selling is not only sensible but also directly beneficial to them and to the university, to not only support but to embrace and champion the idea (no pun intended), is much more difficult. It is an open-ended, unstructured problem, messy, novel, emotional, political.

This is not a marketing task—as Edwin Land once said, that’s what you do when your product is bad. It’s a challenge of organizational leadership that seeks to bring about integrated organizational change.

It’s integrated because it affects and involves many parts of the university. It is not simply a “deal” or transaction or operating change, although it compromises all those things, but a shift in mindset and a choice about identity that drives them all. It’s this that elevates it from a management task or project to a job of institutional leadership—for the president—a job of his or her own initiation.

It is tempting to think that things will change for the better if you do something along the lines of what Utah has done, but it won’t. That falls into the category of the same, but more.  It leaves big-time college sports exactly as it was, except with more money for football to spend. This is an example of compartmentalized change, which never works when institutional goals are at stake. You have to change everything it touches, working from short- to long-term, but knowing where you’re going.

How to Begin

The beginning of any change process is the most important, without which all efforts at change will fail. It is the process of establishing readiness—sometimes called urgency but I use readiness to describe the organizational state you seek to establish in preparation for change. Done well, creating readiness in fact produces an active desire and even demand for the change you seek to make. It is, at heart, an educational process. It answers the why questions and deals with objections in advance, and takes important steps to reduce "change anxiety." It requires accurate and honest analysis and complete transparency; political and personal interests undermine success.

Gearing up to create readiness can be done by a small team of analysts and strategists working with clear guidance from and collaboration with the president. You are in the data gathering and ideal modeling stage, well before the need for approvals or support that themselves rely on this phase of work.  

Preparing for the readiness stage is essentially developing a calculus of the value of selling, drawing on current and historical data to develop a grounded ideal model of the future. Ultimately, it provides the clarity of purpose that will aid in persistence, patient and interactive response, and calm through inevitable pushback at the early stages of communication.

Moreover, you will learn a lot, and begin thinking about organization in new ways; that’s a promise. Here are some steps to doing the work that will enable you to create a story of a better future for all.