A Common Purpose for Sports
How do we implement purpose-driven business practices in the sports industry?
Last week, I wrote about why business leaders aught to be driven by purpose, not profits, going forward. While I am a believer in the Simon Sinek idea of “Start With Why,” I also believe that the next step of figuring out how is just as important. Figuring out the how is figuring out what actions to take as an individual, as a team, as a company, as an industry.
Today, I wanted to share my thoughts about the "how” of implementing purpose-driven business practices throughout the sports industry.
From my perspective, there is a tremendous opportunity for the global sports industry to be a leading force for purpose-driven business practices. There are already great social impact initiatives being executed in leagues and teams across the world, including some of the programs the NFL implemented around the Super Bowl. However, what we are going for here is a fundamental shift in how we run our businesses in sports and what we use as a measuring stick for success.
The shift from a growth-hungry, profit-first mindset to a purpose-driven mindset will change the way we do business. But the key question is, how do we figure out how to run the sports industry with purpose?
What I’ll explore today is a potential framework for setting a macro-level purpose for the sports business, and then leveraging that macro-purpose to instill a micro-level purpose into each league, team, and athlete. What I’m aiming for here is a mental model for how we, as an industry, might collectively move our businesses forward towards a more sustainable, equitable future.
To start with, let’s look at the big picture, and think about a common purpose that the entire sports industry could rally behind. What if all of global sports entities could rally behind a single purpose? How might that come together, and what would the benefits of a shared purpose be?
Common Purpose
What is the purpose of the sports industry, as a whole? Think about it for a second.
Is the purpose of the sports business to entertain people? To inspire people? To build community? To enrich team owners, league executives, and professional athletes? To serve as an advertising platform for the biggest brands in the world?
This isn’t an easy question to answer. The sports industry exists for several of these reasons, but what I’d like to try to do here is to re-frame the idea of purpose in sports business and try to create a common purpose for the industry.
What is a common purpose, and why should an entire industry think about defining it’s common purpose? To me, a common purpose is a single, unifying vision for why an industry exists which defines how it can make the world a better place.
Common Purpose — a single, unifying vision for why a business industry exists which defines how the industry can make the world a better place.
Businesses are competitive by nature. The sports industry, in particular, is extremely competitive. The NFL competes with the NBA, which competes with MLB, which competes with the NHL, and so on. Our growth mindset in business has meant that our pro sports leagues have always tried to find ways to increase profits, to grow fanbases, and to find ways to get bigger year over year. However, these leagues must address the growing call from consumers and employees to stand for something more than profit and growth.
The reason an industry should think about identifying a common purpose is because of the concept of “a rising tide lifts all boats.” If it’s true that there’s no reason to build businesses that are only driven by profits, as I laid out in my post last week, wouldn’t it also be true that there’s no reason to think of other leagues and teams in the sports industry as competitors? If the NBA and the NFL thought of each other as collaborators, rather than competitors, imagine the collective impact that these businesses might be able to deliver for people and the planet.
Let’s say all of the pro sports leagues in North America came together and said, “we’ll compete for people’s attention, and we’ll compete for our share of the profits, but we are all going to collaborate to find ways to make the world a better place.” That is what I’m envisioning with an industry-wide common purpose. Leagues, teams, and athletes would come together and form coalitions and collective action frameworks to tackle the big, complex issues facing our society. Paradoxically, by uniting around a shared purpose, the entire sports business might end up growing their profits as a side effect.
So, let’s give this a shot. Let’s try to write a common purpose statement for the sports industry. From there, we can start to explore what we would do with it. Here’s my first shot:
The sports industry’s Common Purpose is to inspire humanity to lead healthy lives, work together in harmony, and pursue excellence in all facets of life.
Breaking down my common purpose statement, there are three main elements that I see as defining why the sports business exists:
Inspire humanity to lead healthy lives — Watching the best athletes on the planet hone their bodies to the peak of human performance inspires individuals and communities to lead their own active, healthy lifestyles.
Inspire humanity to work together in harmony — Sports instills the concepts of teamwork, sacrifice, and contribution to something bigger than one’s self throughout society.
Inspire humanity to pursue excellence — The exploits of teams and athletes around the globe creates an example for how individuals can pursue excellence in their health, work, relationships, and service.
This is a first draft, but it could be a starting point for a powerful rallying cry in the sports industry. However, while inspiring words are fun to read and write, the most important thing for our industry is to take these words and put them into action. In the next section, we’ll dive into how we might take this common purpose statement and put it to good use.
Purpose in Action
OK, you tell me. So the sports industry adopts a common purpose statement. So what? Those are just words on a page. What do we actually do with these words? How does this translate into action? I’m glad you asked.
The next step—once we establish a macro purpose statement—is to align our work as an industry towards very specific goals. One thing I’ve observed in the sports industry is that there is lots of good work being done by leagues, teams, athletes, and the brands that associate with each entity. Tons of good is being done, but it is disorganized and disjointed. It seems to me that aligning our efforts as an industry would be more effective than having hundreds of smaller initiatives attacking symptoms as opposed to root causes.
My recommendation for the sports industry would be align itself with three-to-five of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that it could pursue with intensity and rigor over the next ten years. And while it might be difficult to imagine an entire industry deciding on just three, four, or five goals together, that’s why a common purpose statement could be so powerful. It could help us focus on contributing to goals that are natural and genuine to our industry. It could ensure that we don’t try to do too much, or spread ourselves too thin, while pointing our resources towards meaningful impact that will have a positive impact on people and the planet.
If we took my proposed purpose statement for the sports industry, and broke it down, we could identify five SDGs that are authentic and true to why the sports business exists. Again, this is one man’s humble opinion, but it’s a starting place.
SDGs for the Sports Industry
SDG #3: Good Health and Well-Being
As outlined in the common purpose statement, the sports industry has a clear opportunity to inspire humanity to lead healthy lives. It makes sense then, for sports to align its efforts with SDG number three: Good Health and Well-being.
In North American sports, many of the leagues and teams already run programs that encourage and foster the development of healthy lifestyle habits. Two such initiatives are the NFL’s Play 60 movement in partnership with the American Heart Association and the NBA FIT initiative, which is supported by Kaiser Permanente.
A way that the sports industry might challenge itself would be to find ways to coordinate on a nationwide health and well-being movement. How might the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB work together to ensure all of their fans are receiving a drumbeat of messaging, resources, and programming to foster good health year round?
SDG #4: Quality Education
Sports and education have been attached at the hip for ages. Here in the United States, our school system has built a massive organized sports infrastructure from elementary school all the way through the college/university system. It would seem natural for the sports business to rally around the SDG focused on education.
As a good example of how sports already contributes to SDG number four, the NHL operates a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education program for middle school age students called Future Goals. Future Goals leverages the game of hockey to teach kids physics and geometry concepts in an engaging digital course.
Since the program’s launch, the world’s premier hockey league has impacted over 2.7 million students, who have spent 6 million hours of learning STEM concepts. In addition, the NHL and its education technology partner, EVERFI*, have hosted over 700 events including 270,000 students in all thirty-one NHL markets across the U.S. and Canada.
Education is a staple for the development of children worldwide. Sports has an opportunity to double down on its investment in education, in concert with health and wellbeing efforts, so that we build a generation of healthy, well-educated young people who make positive contributions to society.
SDG #5: Gender Equality
Boys and girls, men and women—we all enjoy playing and watching sports. Unfortunately, the sports industry has not done a great job in the past at ensuring that it empowers women and girls in the same way it lifts up men and boys.
There are signs of progress, though. Last summer, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team took the world by storm on its way to a World Cup title. Off the field, they continue to fight for equal pay from the U.S. Soccer Federation, and just recently, the U.S. Men’s team released a statement in support of the Women’s team fight.
“The women's 2017-2021 deal is worse than the men's 2011-2018 deal," the USMNT Players’ Association statement said. "What we believe should happen is simple. Pay the women significantly more than our recently expired men's deal.”
Now is the decade for sports to lead the fight on gender equality. As an industry, I see no reason why we could not unite around SDG number five.
SDG #13: Climate Action
I believe this statement, which can be found on a display at Nike’s NYC headquarters, says it best: “If there is no planet, there is no sport.”
Via Nike
Nike created this display during the announcement, in September last year, of its “Move to Zero” sustainability plan. “At Nike, we believe that climate change is the defining environmental issue of our generation because the reality is if there's no planet, there's no sport," Nike's chief sustainability officer Noel Kinder said at an event announcing the program.
There may be no single sustainable development goal that is more important than SDG number thirteen, Climate Action. It seems to me that this goal is a no-brainer for the entire sports industry to contribute towards.
SDG #16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
There is a long history of prominent athletes leveraging their platform and influence in society to advocate for peace and justice. Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, and Jackie Robinson. Tommie Smith and John Carlos. More recently, Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe. These individuals stood for something bigger than sports, and many have been shamed or ridiculed for their stances.
It’s time for the sports industry to stand as one as a global force for peace, justice, and strong institutions. The leagues, teams, and brands that associate with leaders like the athletes named above should be celebrated and lifted up. Our industry has unparalleled reach and influence around the world, and by aligning with SDG number sixteen, we can work hard to instill peace and justice for all.
Execution, Measurement, and Reporting
Assuming the sports industry can agree on a common purpose statement, and then agree on five SDGs to align with, the next steps will be to execute, measure and report on progress towards the goals.
This section alone deserves its own post. For now, though, let’s take a quick look at how sports business organizations might orient themselves toward effective execution, measurement and reporting practices.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide guidance here. For each of the seventeen goals, the UN Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDG) has set targets and indicators which explicitly state the outcomes each goal aims to achieve, and the metrics we can use to gauge if we’ve realized those outcomes.
At a micro level, each league, team, athlete, non-profit, and brand that makes up the sports industry can uses these targets and indicators to decide how they will take action and contribute to the goals. If the SDG is the high-level vision of what we want to achieve, the targets and indicators are the ground-level activities that need to be executed to achieve the vision.
Take SDG number four, Quality Education, for example. The vision for this goal is to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” But the targets and indicators for this goal include much more clarity on outcomes and metrics.
Target 4.1 for example reads as follows:
“By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes.”
Indicator 4.1.1 provides the metric:
“Proportion of children and young people: (a) in grades 2/3; (b) at the end of primary; and (c) at the end of lower secondary achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in (i) reading and (ii) mathematics, by sex.”
There are anywhere from six-to-ten targets, and fifteen-to-twenty indicators for each SDG. You can see how the targets and indicators could be a ready-made field guide for sports organizations to take action and measure their progress.
We do not need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to execution, measurement and reporting. The sports industry can look to the SDGs for guidance on what to work on, and how to measure success. The final challenge will be reporting on that success in a comprehensive way so that all stakeholders in the industry understand how we are progressing and what our return on investment is. Again, I won’t get into further detail on what that reporting process could or should be in this post, but I would venture to say that third-party entities might be brought in to deliver non-biased reports for all to see.
Come Together, Right Now
The world’s challenges are big and complex. That’s why we need big, complex, and well-resourced industries to coordinate, not compete, to face them down.
A common purpose for the global sports business, combined with collective action plan aligned to the SDGs, could be one of the most powerful ways to make this world a better place.
I would urge the most powerful global sports business leaders to take a good hard look at the realities of the world today. We live in a world that is warming at an unsustainable rate. We live in a world rife with inequality in income and opportunity. We live in a world still full of violence and injustice. Does profit and growth in your business truly matter when all of these problems exist?
Let’s come together, right now. The next ten years will move much faster than any of us realize. If we want to make a positive change in the world, we will have much better chance at doing so working together.
Win-Win-Win is a community for purpose-driven leaders in the sports and entertainment industry. Once a week, on Thursdays, I’ll send you a thoughtful essay/blog post about how we might leverage the influence of our industry for good. Please reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn if you’d like to connect and discuss my work or find ways that we might collaborate.
*Disclosure — I am a former employee of EVERFI, and a shareholder in the company.