Steve Ballmer Says Businesses Can Learn Accountability From Sports Teams
November 12 2018 - 7:56PM
Dow Jones News
By Rolfe Winkler
LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. -- Nothing sells sports tickets like
winning a championship.
Former Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer says that is
perhaps the most obvious insight he has learned in his time owning
the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, but it has taught him
lessons for business.
Customers and shareholders assess businesses. "But they're
casual," Mr. Ballmer said at The Wall Street Journal's WSJ Tech
D.Live conference on Monday. "Casual compared to the millions of
fans who are sitting there studying every move, who have access to
all the performance data that you do."
Assessing how well teams work? In business, it isn't so easy to
know how well teams are performing at all times. "Every 24 seconds,
everybody knows how our teamwork is," said Mr. Ballmer, referencing
the shot clock in basketball.
"You want accountability? Sports," Mr. Ballmer said. "I find the
level of accountability frightfully more powerful than I did when I
was CEO" of Microsoft.
There are similarities between running a sports enterprise and
other kinds of businesses, Mr. Ballmer said: "It's all about the
product, stupid."
For the Clippers, Mr. Ballmer is looking for growth by wringing
extra revenue out of his superfans, in part through a deal with
augmented reality company Second Spectrum that is providing more
advanced sports analytics than have previously been available.
Write to Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 12, 2018 19:41 ET (00:41 GMT)
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