Making sports better

Watching sports has been great for me. I love the passion it creates, the joy, the camaraderie. Living in New York, I’m lucky enough to be able to see the best of US sports and a lot of European soccer, often at times of day that don’t disrupt the family and with excellent coverage. Among my lifelong picks, somehow I chose the New England Patriots, at a time when they were not much good, and have been rewarded by a successful dynasty that may be unrivalled, especially given the way the NFL strives to lovel their playing field. Bill Belichick showed just one more time on Sunday how far ahead he is of his peers, so much so that pundits think another Patriot Superbowl win is almost inevitable, despite the fact that our talent is probably less than Phildelphia’s.

If you don’t follow sports, you are missing out on something that could be good in your life, and I encourage you to give it a try. It is never too late, and the rewards come quickly. For each sport, choose a team (or player) and then stay loyal.

Sports are great, and a lot of TV coverage is great too nowadays. When I watch old games I see how far forward things have come. Technology has helped, as has fitness and money – in the end all the cash has generated excellence, and we can all benefit.

But all sports can improve further. And one way is to look at what works in other sports and on other continents, and shamelessly copy where appropriate. It is good that sports are rather conservative about rule changes – that way lifelong fans and statistics are not disrespected – but evolution is good too. In particular, US sports can learn from their global counterparts and vice versa. Here are some examples.

For soccer, the single biggest change that I would advocate would be to increase the size of the goals, both height and width. That would be so sacrilegious, but I believe it would improve the game. Goalkeepers would hate it, but in the end they would perhaps benefit the most because their skills would be valued more highly. The main effect of making the goals bigger would be to generate more goals, and hence more excitement and fewer draws. The secondary effect would be to encourage offence and render the current curse of attack against defence games less likely, since the tactic is much less likely to work. Soccer snobs scoff at US pundits for disparaging the 0-0 draw, but we should recognise that they are correct. Grow those goals!

Next in soccer, I would institute a stopping clock, one that only moved when the ball was in play, like they have in US football or basketball and now rugby as well. This simple step would render timewasting worthless, and allow for such things as timeouts and quarters instead of halves. After that, I would add more referees and make greater use of replay technology – again learning from the NFL I would use it for all goals, penalties and sendings off and allow some coaches challenges. It can often be applied without stopping play. Conservatives hate replay, even in sports where it is now established, but it makes the games fairer. In US football, there is endless argument when a marginal call is overturned or not, but people lose sight of the much more common event of an egregious call being overturned – there was a great example on Sunday when a Minnesota touchdown was invalidated by clear evidence that the ball hit the turf.

US football can learn in the other direction. The game is in danger of becoming obsolete within a generation because of head trauma. Many kids are destined to have foreshortened lives, and this is not acceptable in modern society. My solution is to get rid of the helmets, replace then with softer head guards, and then apply tackling rules from rugby. The game can still be thrillingly violent and physical, but the kids could expect to escape most concussions. The only other thing I would change is to be slightly less in hoc to the TV adverts that pay for everything, via shorter and fewer breaks in play. It is farcical to watch a live game and observe all the players ready to continue but waiting for over a minute until the TV director gives a signal.

US basketball has become an ugly game dominated by personality rather than sports content, so I rarely watch it. I want to see brilliance and excitement, not a fawning camera or commentator focused only on a few players. That sort of culture is hard to change, but I have some other examples of potential rule changes. I would start with relegation. This is the main difference between US and European sports – because the owners choose it to be so, the teams in the leagues are always the same, unless an owner should choose the change. Further, while there are conferences, there is no hierarchy between divisions.

This has large consequences, most of them bad. In basketball, it is a disaster. To work towards parity, the teams with the worst records in a season get to choose first among graduating college players. In a game with only five on the court at a time, this is a big deal. And a result is that many teams are ambivalent or worse about their results as the season develops. If a team will not reach the playoffs, it pays to finish as poorly as possible. Even the playoffs offer only a minor advantage to teams with better records, so the regular season becomes seriously devalued. This is a travesty for fans.

It would be easily fixed by introducing a hierarchy of divisions. Divide the thirty teams into three divisions of ten. At the end of the season, institute promotion and relegation, via playoffs if desired. The worst team from division three goes out of the league altogether. At a stroke, we end the evil of “tanking”, create more games between top and evenly matched teams, and abolish most of the inconsequential games.

Baseball can benefit in the same way. It has even more inconsequential games – for many of the teams the season is more or less over from half way through. Divisions and relegation can change that in an instant. I think I would also divide the season into two mini-seasons, with promotion relegation twice per year.

Baseball also has the same problem as cricket, in that its traditional form starts to feel outdated in the world of instant gratification. Like cricket, this is hard to address, because a lot of the beauty of the game lies in its slow pace, and there is a risk that tinkering would lose more traditional fans than it would gain new ones. Cricket found something of a solution in having parallel formats. Rather than tinker more with the regular game, I think I would introduce a shorter parallel game in baseball – fewer innings, shorter at-bats, restricted pitcher changes and so on. In a three-day stretch, teams could play traditional games on two days, and two shorter games on the third day, in a separate league.

The US has some other strange habits with sports broadcasting, but could also teach the Europeans. My biggest gripe is the generalist play-by-play announcer. Joe Buck does a passable job at football, but then shows up commentating on big baseball games too, where he demonstrates that his knowledge of the game is not good enough. Imagine Martin Tyler commentating on cricket!

There are many other examples. For me the primary lesson is how reluctant institutions are to look beyond their walls and learn from outside. You find it in sports, in society and in business. In society, a great example is the use of traffic lights. In US cities, they have more lights, but they choreograph the timing between lights, and crucially they allow longer time periods to clear traffic. That would go along way to improve flow in London – yet so obvious a solution is not considered.

We all tend to be blind to such simple opportunities to learn and copy. Fortunes are spent on research and innovation, but the biggest improvements often come from the simplest and cheapest approaches. Take a look at your own business or even your own life. There are sure to be opportunities out there.

In the meantime, go Patriots. The dynasty must end one day, but let that day not come too soon.

In praise of Populism

I had a colleague about ten years ago who used to argue with me about progress and the will of the people. I can’t remember the overall context, but I remember being in awe of the way technology was offering more information to ordinary people as well as the greater opportunity to express their preferences. My friend took the opposite line, considering that only bad things would come from such a representative system – people were simply not well enough educated and too easily swayed to be trusted to make good decisions.

I lost touch with this colleague when I left Shell and then left Europe. But the last ten years might be seen as a case study of why he might have been right and I might have been naïve and wrong. Nonetheless, I think I am still on the same side of the argument as I was then.

I can recite the evidence for the contrary view. Great enabling technology such as blogging and Twitter and Facebook feeds have been dumbed down by the public and those marketing to them in the same way that other advances were beforehand. Given the chance to become truly informed, instead people pander to their own initial prejudices, surround themselves with gossip and junk, and allow their attention spans to diminish towards zero. Lacking respect towards history and without any personal experience of the horrors of war or fascism, the same people become cynical and indifferent about any questions of policy, and open to simplistic slogans and dog whistles playing to their inner fears. The result is closet racism, Grillo, Duterte, Erdogan, Farage, Trump, and whatever global indignities are to come in 2018 and beyond.

All of this is true. I read an article over the holidays that used experiments to prove that our prejudices really are hard-wired, baked in by evolution and inherited traits to fear the outsider or disruption. In tests, even extreme liberals made subconscious choices to favour white faces over black ones, and gender stereotypical ones too. We really are built to resist tolerance and change.

The Economist Christmas special was rather disappointing this year. It is the magazine that I look forward to the most in any year, and perhaps is the highlight of my holiday, finding precious time to curl up with the quirky articles from all over the world. Most of them left me flat this year for some reason, except for a long essay about the history of nationalism or populism. The article debunked the claim by Fukuama in 1989 that the fall of the Berlin wall represented the end of history and the ultimate triumph of democracy and capitalism, not just from the hindsight of what has happened since but also the foresight of history. We have always, so far, found ways to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory. 1989-2017 is just the most recent example.

As further context, I was uplifted by the inspired choice of Time magazine to devote their first magazine of 2018 to celebrating human progress, under the guest editorship of Bill Gates. Despite the missed opportunities and ugly politics, we really are moving forward at an unprecedented pace. Female education, infant mortality, sexual tolerance and disease eradication are just a few examples. There is more to come – understanding the brain is so close now and potentially so powerful.

The Economist article analysed various historical and current examples, and concluded that populism is as old as the hills and rarely leads to good outcomes. It tried to define populism, but seemed to add unnecessary elements. In its purest form, surely populism is a movement that seeks to give the people what they want? In the Economist, the definition seemed to focus on those aspects of what the people may want that elites may not want.

A different article in the Guardian weekly was more forgiving of populism, but added a different wrinkle that I thought was just as poorly argued. This one accepted populism as simply what the people want, but tried to claim that aspects of the policy of current popular populists such as Trump were not really populism but nativism. Nativism involved unjustifiably putting ones own group or tribe above other groups, and was the backbone of apartheid, racism or fascism. So populism is good, but nativism is bad, and the current crop of unwelcome leaders are not really populists but nativists.

I didn’t buy that argument. Sadly, nativism really is a large element of what most of the people really do want. We can’t separate it from other populist platforms because we don’t like it. It is a core part of many populist messages – indeed the part that creates an umbrella for other policy aspects that would otherwise only create indifference, such as protectionism.

So, my friend would argue, QED. We are hard-wired to be racist and intolerant and reactionary. Technology only feeds these weaknesses, and leaves us open to bad policy from tyrants. Look at Trump, and the worrying fact that most of his supporters remain loyal despite everything. So we need checks and balances. Those with education and insight should protect the people from itself.

But I have not changed my position. Just consider where that thinking leads. It is precisely the thinking that led to slavery, colonialism and apartheid. It is the thinking that gave only a few hundred the people the vote in England during the nineteenth century, and then held back votes for women. Watch Victoria, or even The Crown and listen to the smug attitudes surrounding monarchs and elitist leaders as recently as fifty years ago. The whole way of thinking is that our team are worthy of decision making while others are not. Each generation finds its own excuse to protect its unearned privilege.

So what can we do? First, it is fair that some protections against impulsiveness by the people are justified. They exist already. We have judges trying cases not lynch mobs. We have scientists on expert panels not random citizens. We have civil servants using their professional expertise to balance elected representatives. This works. Move forwards, but at a sensible speed. Referenda make sense in some instances, not others, for example where expertise is deep and technical or when immediacy can cloud rational sense.

Next, continue progress and trust it. Forthcoming advances in brain medicine will make a rapid step change in public competence, whatever we do to limit our attention spans. Continue to invest in education, equitable education, as a major public policy. And have patience.

Finally, those of us who count ourselves as progressives should never hide behind the remaining lies that we and our peers peddle that insult people or that suit us tactically. Let us call out the nation state for the damaging construct that it has become, and challenge nativism hidden as patriotism. Let us call out our religious leaders when they continue to use arguments of superiority or superstition to manipulate people and hold up progress. Let us nurture and defend a free press even when we don’t like their message. Let us call out the looting that characterises today’s extreme capitalism, and the protectionism of unjust privileges like green belts or professional closed shops or subsidised private schools. Most of all, let us remember that most of us who are tempted to think that our opinion is more worthy than that of others have largely achieved our level of knowledge and insight due to the accident of our birth.

So, populism does terrible things and can show up the worst of humanity. But, despite that, long live populism. I trust it to evolve and learn and deliver humanity to a brighter future.

My Life in Sandwiches

A quirky article in the Guardian Weekly just before Christmas explored the subject of sandwiches. I loved it. It was a great example of the evolution of consumer preferences and the ability to firms to respond to them, in the specific category is food on the go. At Shell, I observed a small part of this revolution first hand, so that piqued my interest even more. I love these retail stories. This one links in some ways to the movie The Founder that I saw last year, and loved for precisely the same reason.

I am British, so sandwiches have played a big part of my life. Nearly all Brits eat a lot of sandwiches. Our style is for two flat slices of bread with some filling, often lined with butter or margarine. Nearly all cultures have something similar, but not exactly the same. As examples, the French love baguettes, the Dutch harder bread in what they call brotjes.

As a small child, I think at least one meal on most days included sandwiches. My mum bought the cheapest white loaf, along with most other Brits, a product already used as a loss leader in most supermarkets and sold for a few pence. It contained some preservatives, had a slightly sweet taste and lasted a few days. My mum was not a culinary expert, so her sandwich menu was cheese or ham with tomato or cucumber. This was enough to make me happy. But I did notice that when I went to play at our friends’ house, the Frews, their mum’s sandwiches were more tasty, because she put salt with the tomato and sugar with the cucumber.

At school, where we stayed all day until 8.30 at night, everyone needed a snack in mid afternoon, especially after sports. We were boys and had simple tastes and little desire to cook, so the school provided a four-slice toaster and an endless supply of white loaves and cheap margarine. Everyone consumed plain toast in enormous quantities.

As an 18-year-old, I left home and boarded at a house in a London suburb, commuting to the west end each weekday. I was given luncheon vouchers, two a day I think worth 45p each. I did what everyone else did. Once a week we would go out an have a cheap pizza or Chinese (Soup and B was the favourite, I recall), and other days we bought sandwiches from one of a number of holes in the wall, where a foreign guy made to order at rapid speed, because his entire trade was squeezed into a short interval at lunchtime. I probably ordered the simplest and cheapest items, but was still wowed by something like fresh egg mayonnaise. London had a big enough market for guys like that to make a living, but my guess is that in most cities people bought their own sandwiches in cling film to work.

My next sandwich memory comes from my time in Belfast as a travelling rep for Shell at 25, in the mid 1980’s. I spent many days driving around Northern Ireland calling in at petrol stations. I don’t believe any of those stations had anything for my lunch. I managed one for a time, and the dominant categories were cigarettes, candy and fizzy drinks. Other sales came from car accessories, magazines and stuff you might find in 99 cent stores like plastic containers. Unless I wanted to live on candy, I had to buy my lunch elsewhere. So I often called on what they called a home bakery. These didn’t sell sandwiches either, do my best bet was some fancier bread product with something like sultanas. Some days I just ate raw bread.

This is where the Guardian weekly article comes into the story. A genius working for Marks and Spencer had an idea, and started selling packed sandwiches in their stores, starting around 1980. It was not easy to make this work. Essentially, he needed a local army of hole-in-the-wall type sandwich makers near every store, and some sort of supply chain with vans. A lot was thrown away, but a lot sold as well, and margins were high. Gradually, Marks and Spencer improved the supply side, working on packaging, cool storage, demand estimating, and things like finding tomatoes that didn’t make everything soggy.

This single product line was the making of Marks and Spencer food courts, which gave the retailer a long spell of strong profitability as other department stores floundered. And before long everyone was copying the idea, learning the same lessons but ultimately changing the retail world. Pret a Manger started in the 1980’s, and now has stores in New York and Asia and Europe. This is a triumph of British retail ingenuity.

In Britain now, many people will have a wrapped sandwich or two for lunch. According to the Guardian, many of us will have exactly the same one every day. We can buy them everywhere, from staff canteens to convenience stores to fast food outlets, coffee shops and yes, petrol stations. In a separate article, I recently read that someone from Morrison’s (a supermarket) had become CEO of Gregg’s (a baker, not unlike those home bakeries in Belfast) and was turning the business around by focusing on prepared food such as sandwiches. Now in the US I often get my morning coffee from Panera, which is doing the same thing. In the Guardian article, people in the industry are focusing on making a sandwich a choice not just at lunch but at all the other times of day too.

The international side of this story is where my own experience feeds back in. In the early 1990’s I had a similar job as the one in Belfast, this time around Birmingham. By then Shell UK had caught the sandwich bug, as part of its push into food to go. My staff included a shop expert, and my sales reps started spending as much time focusing on shops as on fuel. I could even buy my lunch on site! Then in 1996 I was sent to Scandinavia, where the food on the go craze was in full swing.

It was a blessing to be thrust into the centre of this revolution. In some ways we in Scandinavia were the pioneers. We sold some sandwiches, but our consumers loved hot dogs more than anything else, and we became experts in all aspects of that business. On many stations, our shops were making more margin than fuels, and we became so confident (arrogant?) that we even started opening stand-alone stores with our Select brand. The rest of the world noticed, and Select became a huge initiative for Shell.

But then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped again. The stores were not making the money expected. Some petrol heads in Shell’s head offices challenged the potential of stores, then slowed things down, then franchised them out, then retreated to a former business model.

What happened? Well, there are many lessons, and I was almost uniquely placed to observe them, though I did not have enough skill to predict them nor to argue successfully for a different strategy. Our biggest mistake was to overlook that markets and cultures are different. Within Norway, some locations were perfect for hot dog sales but others not, either because of traffic patterns, competition or habits. Norwegians loving hot dogs did not mean Swedes would love the same ones just as much. In fact, Swedes live in larger cities, there was an established lunch practice called Dagens Rätt that covered most of the market, and if consumers there wanted anything it was mashed potatoes, a fact we learned, but later than we should have. Other European and Global markets had their own quirks, ones that a centralising and standardising multinational was never going to have the skills to understand – unless someone understood that centralisation and standardisation had limits.

So now I can sit in my comfy seat in Panera, enjoying my Latte and bread treat and my Guardian Weekly and reflect on all these trends. Shell was so near to a major breakthrough, but lacked the skills and patience, and even the purpose, to see it through. Marks and Spencer were lucky to have their pioneer, their locations, and their senior leadership to change their market via sandwiches. Pret a Manger did a good job too.

And somewhere out there is another massive opportunity, characterised by unmet consumer needs. With hindsight, even my own limited personal experiences as a youth were enough to spot the massive opportunity that was prepared sandwiches in the UK. Think hard enough and smartly enough and you might be able to spot the next one. It is not easy – or everyone would be doing it. But it is not impossible either.