When the spotlight is on, be ready to shine

If you’re not a sports fan, you might not be aware of the hottest sensation in the business right now. Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks point guard who graduated from Harvard, is Asian and was unheralded, undrafted and pretty much a cinch not to be an NBA starter is in fact, doing everything people bet against him to do.

One of the few people to identify this talent’s prospects was a FedEx guy by the name of Ed Weiland. The Wall Street Journal today featured him briefly – at work, no less — after he wrote an article in advance of the 2010 draft preview for a basketball advanced statistics site that indicated Lin might be the 2nd best prospect at his position in that draft.

“Jeremy Lin is a good enough player to start in the NBA,” Weiland wrote, “and possibly star.”

Let’s distill that a bit more. There are actual people paid who identify talent in all corners of the earth. Especially throughout the United States. Jeremy Lin received exactly 0 scholarships for college after a career where he was named Northern California player of the year and led his team to a state title. He then goes to Harvard and helps lead the team to  a share of the Ivy title in his senior year. Yet, the universal message is “we didn’t see him coming. We had no idea he was this good.”

Except a guy who is amateur stat-head writing for an obscure blog on the internet and who delivers packages. Now with the kid’s ascent, the blog post in question gets crashed and surely some NBA has to wonder how they can employ Mr. Weiland’s services for their own purposes.

But this whole feel-good story made me think about how we hire people. They write cover letters and resumes which you might read/scan or otherwise parse through some source and then you pick the best ones to interview hoping your intuition will make them the best fit. Occasionally, they get auditions through spec work or samples beforehand. Especially in the web space, this is how the game gets played.

What if the whole process was wrong? Going back to the example of Lin, he’d been cut by two other teams before landing with the Knicks in late December. If it weren’t for a spate of injuries to their roster, there’s absolutely no way he’d gotten his opportunity to play. 25-minutes against a sub-par team where his team needed a boost was ultimately the difference between being out of a job for the 3rd time in a year and where he is now. The next night, he earned his first NBA start and the rest is history.

Lin’s success is borne no doubt out of the fact that he’s playing for a coach who runs a system relying on a player with his unique attributes. Yet, these attributes were never revealed to the coach during their practices or any other scenario that would have led him to believe what we’re seeing now is possible. Perhaps it’s just a confluence of unique circumstances which have brought this to light, but the takeaways for identifying talent and for people looking for jobs seems clear in this example to me:

If you’re hiring talent, it’s easy to fill positions based on what you’ve always had rather than what you actually need. This kind of self-assessment doesn’t come easy and it’s not something lots of organizations are equipped to do. If you’re looking for a job, it’s easy to look for things like salary, benefits and other things without wondering you’ll be a good fit. Questions like:

1. Does this role fit my strengths? Can I succeed here?
2. How do I define success in this role? What are my long-term goals?
3. What benchmarks can I establish beyond the ones set for me internally to measure my own success?

This might seem like a lot of headwork for a job you might just have. But I’ve seen so many scenarios where people could save themselves the trouble of being in a bad-fit environment by just being more deliberate about what they’re needing at a particular point in your career. None of this matters if you fail to get an opportunity and so, there’s a difference between being discerning and holding yourself back.

Once you get a chance to shine, you need to put your best foot forward and always be preparing for the chance for when the spotlight is on you. Those opportunities don’t always manifest themselves and so, you owe it to yourself to relish them when they do. It might not yield an arena of 20,000 screaming your name or adulation a world away, but it’s still pretty nice to know what you’re made of when you have a chance to prove it.

BYU goes independent

One of the first football games I went to at the University of Wyoming was against Brigham Young University. The taunts hurled in their direction from the student section are not quite fit for a family publication.

In any case, the Cougars of BYU are leaving the friendly confines of the Mountain West Conference after this season, choosing instead to strike it on their own as an independent, opting instead for the West Coast Conference for all sports besides football.

This move is huge for the fledging WCC, which is made up of private religious schools that are similar in size. Having recently opted not to expand as recently as June, the conference changed its tune quickly when the possibility of BYU joining fell into their lap after the collapse of the Western Athletic Conference.

Most of the fallout seems to be that it doesn’t make any competitive sense for BYU to do this. Except, none of the realignment moves that have happened this year have absolutely anything to do with competitiveness. They have everything to do with money. College sports fans desperately want to believe in the purity of the game, because it makes them feel better when contrasted against the backdrop of holdouts, lockouts and performance enhancing drugs of the pro ranks.

This move makes a ton of sense for BYU in the short term. It’s unlikely the BCS Board of Directors will give BYU much in the way of concessions related to access to BCS bowl games beyond the standard “finish in the Top 14” that they had while in the Mountain West. But the school can schedule whoever it wants. They’ll have help, partnering with ESPN to broadcast their BYU-TV games and that will help tons to create some marquee matchups. Still, the BYU name doesn’t have the same cache as Notre Dame (even if BYU has been a lot better over the past decade) and it’ll be difficult to convert eyeballs west of the Mississippi.

Still, the Mountain West’s horrible TV deal was the sticking point here. It was hampering BYU’s own goals with marketing itself. Worst case scenario, the two parties kiss and make up within a decade in some kind of new conference realignment. Best case? BYU has great success and manages to position itself beyond what it could’ve done as a member of fledging leagues.

I’ve been hypercritical of the Mountain West leadership for being conservative during the quiet period. Boise State should’ve been invited years ago and they would have been smart to position that league well before Utah had a chance to bolt. But their missteps are coming back to haunt them now. The league will be a 10-team league next year, which is still one team more than they’ll have this season. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they found a way to expand to 12 teams before the dust settles.

No matter what, the league they’re inheriting isn’t as good as the one they are leaving behind. Meanwhile, the WAC will need a hail mary to ensure it’s own survival. I suspect UT-San Antonio will join the league and at least one other Texas school to prevent the defection of Louisiana Tech, but if Hawai’i decides it’s easier to be an independent too, they might have a difficult time scrambling to convince half a dozen FCS schools to move up in a few years, since many of them will need to add sports to qualify at that classification.

To really illustrate BYU’s quibble, the MWC television network (The Mtn.) is only available on extended packages via cable and DirectTV sports package. Meanwhile, BYU-TV is available on the basic tier of DirectTV, meaning I could conceivable follow BYU football anywhere, whereas the Mtn. would be an added expense.

I think this move is smart, proactive and low-risk because people aren’t looking at it with the right lenses. It’s all about the dollars and cents and long-term, it makes a lot of sense and cents for BYU to make this move.

We’ll see how it goes, I guess.