The follow-up book to The Elusive Fan by the same author.
Updated for 2014.

As someone who both works in the sports industry and who has taken a number of sports marketing courses, I was greatly impressed with the book. The authors do a great job of explaining intricate marketing concepts in a casual, easy-to-read style. The eight tenets of the book can relate well to almost any entity, whether in sports or not. Additionally, the authors do a terrific job in incorporating case studies into the chapters to make their points come alive.

as expected

An essential text for the sports business world. Case studies/examples drive home the concepts and frameworks presented.

For starters: I spend a good chunk of my leisure time discussing the topics covered in this book. I am a moderator on a sports forum where the hottest topics are those pertaining to team identity and brand development. (It doesn't help that the team in question has had an incredibly bad season.) Being a competitive sort myself, I am always trying to come up with superb insights. Since the material in Sports Strategist is based on courses taught at Northwestern University, I had hoped that the book would help me take my moderating game to the next level.

Instead, I found a little bit of Good to Great, a little bit more of a marketing textbook with occasional forays into intro statistics courses, leavened with lots of fascinating anecdotes that are more entertaining than informative. For example, the first chapter is entitled "A Winning Business." Good title for a first chapter of a sports book! But the opening story focuses on the conversion of an old Indiana synagogue into a team store for a minor league baseball team. Cute, but I'm not clear that it has anything to do with the rest of the chapter. The book is full of these moments, as if someone spent a year or two clipping stories and then just stuffed them into the manuscript without adhering to any kind of framework. (And there is a framework. It just doesn't get a lot of respect.)

For example, there's a chapter on dealing with crises, entitled "Crafting a Crisis Blueprint." Sounds good, right? The team I support has endured a few crises; how should they have been handled? The chapter begins with a few stories of various crises (Black Sox, individual players who cause trouble), then defines the components of crises, then lurches into a section entitled "The Causes of Today's 'Crises of Crises'," where it lost me completely because there are a couple of stories about baseball players who were adept at self promotion. We learn that Ted Williams liked chocolate milkshakes. Wait! Is a page missing? Isn't this the crisis chapter? Soon the narrative returns to a discussion of price gouging in New Zealand rugby stores. Bad policy, but crisis? Next, we're on to Twitter, and then there's a little box describing Pat Summitt's early onset Alzheimer's, which is sort of related. This wild ride of a chapter concludes with a primer on handling press conferences during a crisis. Nice way to conclude; still not sure how we got there.

There are three authors' names on the cover, and they thank another 10 colleagues, all professors, for their contributions. Somewhere in this written-by-committee-kitchen-sink there's a real, useful book. But the reader is left to her own devices to dig it out from underneath the mass of fascinating but irrelevant tales. A blueprint for a developing leader this is not. Entertaining, yes, but it could have and should have been so much more.

The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High Performance Industry takes the reader into the quickly growing and evolving sports world. Now more than ever, the sporting landscape is crowded with competition for the increasingly precious sports fans dollar. This challenge has been increased by the fact that technology is increasingly making it easier for fans not to come to games. The Sports Strategist is all about dealing with the challenges that this new world of sports defined by increased technology and competition.

This book reads like the fairly well known business book Good to Great by Jim Collins for the sports world. The authors are very clear on needing to have vision for your sports organization, no matter the sport and evaluating potential decision on the basis of that vision. There is also a chapter on the danger of technology—both hastily adopting the newest latest and greatest technology when it really does not fit with your organizations needs and the clumsy use of platforms like Twitter by athletes.

Yet, this book is also different because it contains several chapters on challenges unique to the sports industry. These include: conflict management for when your athletes misstep, ethics in sports, and perhaps most importantly the chapter on sports landscaping which discusses ways that sports teams can better include the public and local community in its efforts to achieve things such as new stadiums so that new projects actually help the community as promised, rather than just becoming a costly multi-million dollar tax payer funded expense that benefits the team alone. This multi-million dollar expense is unacceptable in these times.

A fascinating look at a developing industry.