Learning from Munger & Glassman...Copying Abbott

Innovate...Like Henry Abbott 

 

Henry Abbott is an excellent writer. He’s smart, articulate, and passionate. He loves basketball. And he wants to make it better. His blog ‘TrueHoop’ was an invaluable source of basketball information long before ESPN picked it up.

Henry Abbott, TrueHoop founder, innovator.

As informative and timely as his blog is, though, I think the best thing about it isn’t that it provides enough material that a person could be well-informed about basketball without ever leaving the site. The best thing about it is that Abbott tries to make the game he loves better. And his method is instructive.

This fledgling blog is devoted to learning from two businessmen: Charlie Munger and Greg Glassman. And Abbott’s success can be described by their respective principles. Glassman wasn’t thinking of Abbott (but he may well have been) when he said, “I can tell you what it is that makes you successful in business…the blind and relentless constant pursuit of excellence.”

It’s clear that Abbott loves basketball. And he provided people with stuff they could use: timely insights into the game, interesting analysis, and quick links to some of the best writing on each team. Provided every morning (he had a feature called ‘first cup’ with a nice coffee mug logo that included a short snippet from some of the most compelling basketball writing from across the country).

I don’t know how he wound up landing at ESPN. But I’ll guess it’s pretty similar to the way Glassman went from training a few friends & clients in a couple rooms of a larger center to running a worldwide operation with thousands and thousands of affiliates. Here’s Glassman’s account of how it happened. He outgrew the 1,250-square-foot space where he was training athletes, and didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know anything about business, so he went to the bookstore (maybe he should have tried the library!) “And there wasn’t one book on the shelf, not one, that told me how to improve my product or service.”

Glassman made a list of pros & cons, to determine whether expanding was a good business decision.

“And the mindset was that business is about makin’ money, ’cause if you can’t pay the rent, you won’t be in business. But then it hit me in just a blinding flash: ‘Wait a minute. I’m not trying to make money. Money’s what happens when you do something right.’”

So he threw away the checklist, and asked a different question: “Will it be good for clients?”

And the surest way to make a difference for clients was to be good. Really good. Excellent. And Glassman was able to provide excellence. People noticed. “Excellence is obvious to everyone,” Glassman said. “It’s just that easy.”

“I believe that business is the art and science of providing uniquely attractive opportunities for other people,” he says. “That’s what we’ve done. That’s it. Nothing else.”

Excellence...and then?

Abbott’s blog was excellent. He provided people useful material on a topic they loved. But then, he did something else. Abbott looked around at the sport he loved, and decided that it could be better. So, in addition to his wildly successful blog TrueHoop, he founded another endeavor: HoopIdea. It’s motto: ‘Basketball is the best game ever. Now let’s make it better.’

Abbott set out to make basketball more exciting, more, fun, and more intelligent, and to feature smarter rules, continuous action that features creativity and athleticism, and that got fans on the edge of their seats.

This pursuit mirrors Munger’s favored practice of problem solving via the process of inversion. Munger argues, “The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs work is that problems frequently get easier, I’d even say usually are easier to solve if you turn them around in reverse. In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not ‘how can I help India’, it’s ‘what is doing the worst damage in India? What will automatically do the worst damage and how do I avoid it?’”

A recent post on HoopIdea argues that the engine of success is innovation. At HoopIdea, we’re trying to make sure that the right kind of innovation takes root and improves the game we love.

HoopIdea: a great example of solving problems via inversion.

Just as CrossFit enthusiasts dislike seeing young, healthy athletes go from one isolation bicep curl exercise to another to another when they could be pursuing more functional fitness, Abbott disliked seeing the game he loved be less exciting than it could easily be.

And he did something about it. Abbott's recent post makes the following points:

A near-perfect illustration of the HoopIdea motto, that basketball is the best game on earth ... now let's make it better. Hell yes, changing the game makes sense ... if the idea is right.

Is wondering about how the game could be better a waste of time?...people doing just that have already saved the sport once -- and are role models for the leaders of the free world.

The best thing leadership can do is make sure it doesn't become "ossified." What was the cost of coming to the 3 decades after the idea emerged? How many mistakes like that can the league tolerate?

Don't you love the idea of basketball being open-minded and nimble in a way a leading economist says the whole nation should emulate?

Looking for that 3-point shot 

 

Abbott cites a New Your Times piece that comes to the conclusion the U.S. economy needs to find it's own 3-point shot.

Charlie Munger has made a great living by doing something that might be described as ‘General Intellectual Preparedness.’ Munger’s approach to making sense of the human experience draws on something very much like the mental counterpart of Glassman’s General Physical Preparedness (GPP) model that is at the heart of CrossFit. And the soon-to-be nonagenarian's thinking is innovative in just the way Abbott describes.

I think looking at the world in a sane, intelligent way is worth trying to do well. And I think it's possible to emulate Abbott in doing so. Abbott is at his best when he asks us to consider the costs for taking too long to adopt clearly good ideas. Mungers ideas are, I think, obviously good. While I continue to love basketball, I’m even more interested in exploring ways we can use Munger’s ideas to realize the kind of (mental) excellence Glassman has achieved.