I hesitate to write this article because I am pressed for time and really want to do a good job on this one. But the topic is starting to get stale, so I really need to bang it out.
You probably heard that the University of Washington fired Athletic Director Todd Turner this week. It was a mutual decision, but one in which the school will pay him close to half a million dollars a year to NOT come to work anymore, before his contract runs out sometime in 2009. (Someone please tell me how I can get one of these gigs.)
I’m not a rabid Dawg fan or anything, but I do find the scenario fascinating. Because two weeks ago, this same University made a somewhat controversial non-decision by not firing the football coach they already had. Then a week later, out of the blue, his boss got the axe instead. So I want to look at this from a pure business perspective, and analyze this as if the UW was a public corporation.
So, let’s call UW President Mark Emmert the corporation’s CEO. Let’s say the corporation has 3 major divisions – Athletics, Academics and Research. Todd Turner is the Exec VP of Athletics. Turner has a bunch of product groups under him, tasked with a number of brand categories. The Director of Football is Tyrone Willingham. Willingham has a bunch of Product Managers (his coaches) developing features (the players) for his overall product (the Football team).
Now for a few years now, the product has stunk. And the main reason the overall product has stunk is that the features have not been all that great. Willingham was brought in 3 years ago to improve the features and get a better product to market.
Now the shareholders (the alumni) have been getting restless. They are tired of Oregon and WSU developing better products than them. They are tired of their grandchildren wanting to buy WSU and Oregon products. And a few key shareholders have been hinting at investing their money somewhere else.
So the CEO does what every CEO should do. He asks his Exec VP – "What’s going wrong?" Turner replies, "The current features are already built so you can’t change them. The product managers are working hard, so they should keep their job. And the Director of Football is a great guy who’s really trying hard, so we need to keep him as well."
Now the CEO has a problem. His shareholders are revolting, and his Exec VP has just told him, "Hey man, everything is cool here. Everyone is really trying hard."
The CEO retreats into his office and thinks. "Well, if this is them trying HARD, what happens if they stop trying? And why doesn’t my Exec VP seem to care that we never hit our numbers? Our biggest product in his department is continuing to underachieve, and he’s not mad – in fact he his proud of his guys for trying hard!"
In this scenario, the firing of Todd Turner makes perfect sense. Really, CEO Emmert had no choice. Underperforming product, no punishment of the low levels of management and no promises of improvement. The axe had to fall at the top.
Now, college football has different timing than a corporation, but if you follow this analogy, I think it’s easy to imagine that the whole division is going to be "reorganized" sometime after the new boss gets in.
