The sporting business

In business, companies are judged by how much money they make.
In sport, teams are judged by how many matches and championships they win.
A company wants customers to buy its stuff or use its services. It employs people to make attractive stuff, or deliver must-have services to achieve this.
A sports club wants fans to buy its stuff and watch its matches, but the money this generates is not the main object of the exercise. Winning is.
Building successful teams is an expensive business. It takes time.
According to fans and managers it takes money, too, but sporting life is not that simple. Even if you have unlimited funds, as Manchester City and Chelsea appear to have, you cannot build successful teams instantly. It takes time.
And there is a further complication in football. The employees are all stars. Temperamental, big-headed, stupid stars. You can pay them ridiculous money and give them daft contracts, but if you don’t produce a winning team for them to bask in, they will break their contracts and go to another team.
You could do it without stars. Find some bright youngsters and turn them into a winning team. This takes even more time. And on the way, some of your youngsters turn into stars.
You could try running it like a business. Treat all the players as assets and buy and sell them when the time is right. Mike Ashley is trying this at my club, Newcastle United. It makes winning very difficult and it annoys the paying customers, but football finances have been as stupid as the stars for many years. Who is to say this is the wrong approach?
Sport is much more difficult than ordinary business, so why do businessmen get involved?
Glory. Fame. Crowds chanting your name. You don’t get much of that making widgets.
Nor do you get the venemous hatred sports fans will heap upon you if you fail.
It’s a high-risk venture.

A bright light in a dark world

The bigger Google gets, the louder grow the cries from politicians and media commentators to investigate it, curb it, emasculate it. Sarko is the latest.
I trust Google more than any politician. As far as I am aware, Google never went to war with anyone.
Google started off with a brilliant idea: Make it easier to find stuff on the Internet.
Larry and Sergey made that idea work, but it didn’t make any money.
So Google came up with another brilliant idea: Make it easier for people who want stuff to find people who are selling that stuff.
Larry and Sergey made that work and made shed loads of money because the people who sell stuff have discovered that it is much better to pay Google to find the people who want their stuff than it is to pay for advertising in publications or on television, where very few of the readers or viewers want their stuff.
I’m all for people who make ideas work making money from their talent. The world is full of people with good ideas. Very few make those ideas work. Larry and Sergey earn their success.
And Google do good things with all their money. They provide Internet services for the general public to use free. I use Google Mail to communicate, Google Docs to write stuff, Google Photo to show people my pictures, Google Reader to read stuff, Google Maps to find my way. All for nothing. Brilliant.
If companies want to use Google’s Internet services, or if Joe Individual wants to use them excessively, Google charge them. That sounds fair.
The shouty people want Google to reveal more. The more I find out about Google, the more they seem better than the rest of the world. They treat their employees better than most companies do. I would love to be clever enough and young enough to work for Google.
How many companies tell the world about their philosophy as clearly as this?
http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tenthings.html
When politicians act as fairly as Google do, I’ll take them more seriously.
When the companies employing media commentators treat their employees as clever, valuable parts of the business, I’ll listen with a less cynical ear.
Leave Google to do what Google does so well. It is a shining light in a gloomy world.