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Business As Sport:
A New Perspective

Business people and entrepreneurs use money as a way of keeping score, but that has negative consequences for individuals and society as whole. It encourages an emphasis on income rather than activities that actually create value.

Bottom Line

Business is more fun, and more satisfying, if you think of it as a sport, where income is only part of the process of keeping score.

Table of Contents

Business as the Ultimate Sport

After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts.
- Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975) Greek shipping tycoon

Each of us, if we would grow, must be committed to excellence and to victory, even though we know complete victory cannot be obtained, it must be pursued with all one’s might. The championships, the money, the color; all of these things linger only in the memory. It is the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win; these are the things that endure.
- Vince Lombardi (1913-1970) American Football Coach

Billions of people around the globe are passionate about playing or watching some sport: football, soccer, car racing, running, gymnastics, yachting, tennis; the list of different sports is almost endless.

Most people also participate, at some level, in business; a fortunate few regard business with the same passion they devote to their favorite sporting interest. But for most participants, business is filled with drudgery, routine, irritation, disgust, and anxiety. And that's wrong. Seen in its proper light, and played the right way, business is far more important, challenging, interesting, and rewarding than any sport.

Commentators from around the world have, for centuries past, recognized that business and the pursuit of wealth often resembles a game.

  • Charles Lamb

Two centuries ago Charles Lamb (1775-1834), the great British essayist, said, "Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other." In Lamb's time, when the pursuit of business, or "trade", was viewed as ignoble, it was literally gaming, in the form of dice or cards, that provided the outlet for man's need to surpass his fellow man.

  • Theodore Roosevelt

When Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) said, "Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing" he was both putting life in the context of a game, by referring to "best prize", and repudiating the idea that a life of moneyed leisure and the pursuit of pleasure was a man's proper object.

This will be a recurring theme throughout this book, as we'll discuss many wealthy people who continue to play the game long after the point that increased riches could possibly improve their already extremely high standard of living.

  • Harry Emerson Fosdick

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), American Protestant Minister, looked at life from a broad and religious point of view and saw it as a game: “One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world -- making the most of one's best.” Others, such as German Political Economist and Sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), have taken a much more clinical and secular point of view: “The pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.”.

  • Max Weber

But there is nothing at all “mundane” about the passions pursued by entrepreneurs; whether they are motivated by wealth or, far more often, a great challenge, it is Fosdick’s key phrase – “making the most of one’s best” - exploiting one’s potential in the most positive and constructive way – that is the focus of Business as the Ultimate Sport.

I hope to make the idea of business and sport focused and real, going far beyond tired sports clichés to show how to make business more rewarding, and fun, on a day to day basis, by treating the act of making a living as the ultimate sport, including making rules, and keeping score. We’ll give you some examples of well-known business figures who are known as winners – people like Donald Trump – who are really losers. We’ll show you some people who have mastered business as sport – people who can play by the rules and still get results. And we’ll show you other people, like Richard Branson, for whom business is both a platform for great success and great fun.

In each of our profiles sections, we’ll rate the featured person on a combination of their constructive contributions, or lack thereof, and whether they played by the rules, or, conversely profited at the expense of others.

About The Author

John Groom has written about a wide variety of topics for Internet sites and print publications. His essays have been published in The Washington Post, Builder Magazine, Montgomery Sentinel, Philanthropy, Export Today, and elsewhere.

In describing his varied work The Boston Globe said, "John Groom understands that man's nature is contradictory". Playboy magazine has called his essays "entertaining", while Netscape's Netcenter has said that Groom's writing "can brighten even the dullest day." CNNfn says: "Success caught Groom by surprise, but sometimes even journalists find it satisfying to learn that nice guys can finish first."

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BUSINESS OWNERS AND MANAGERS:

Would you like to make your office more competitive, but in a fun, constructive way that everyone can enjoy?

Attitude Media can construct a custom program for your business, no matter what you, to make it more like a sport - fun and interesting, but in a way that all participants benefit. Pricing depends on the size of your business and complexity of the program.

MORE INFO

Quotes

"He had a genius for selling books," said Jane Friedman, chief executive of digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media Inc., who first met Mr. Riggio in the mid-1960s when he owned the Student Book Exchange bookshop in Manhattan. "That's what distinguished him. His life was books. He believed in the word." These days, Mr. Riggio said, he tends to focus on the parts of the company that "may seem small to other people." What he still enjoys, he said, is getting "involved in copy, in little details of graphic language. I'm not a meddler. People will come and say, 'Len, what do you think of this or that?' I'm a creative soul. I like doing that. I like creating."

—Barnes and Noble CEO on love of books
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