by Jeff Mccandless

Created on: February 19, 2007   Last Updated: April 20, 2007

James Naismith invented basketball.
Not hoopball, basketball. You'll notice there's really no basket in basketball, but there once was.
In 1892, when Mr. Naismith nailed a peach basket to the wall of a gym floor in his local YMCA, basketball was born.

How can this be interesting to a sales or management group of any sort? Well, one year later, after moving a ladder over to the peach basket and climbing up to it to remove the ball every time a basket was made, they replaced the basket with a metal one, which had a hinged hammock-style bottom. One year later.

So what? The real story is that it took another ten years until they realized that it would be ok to remove that hinged bottom, so the ball would just go through the basket every time.
This means that a total of eleven years and two innovations were needed to get to the point where it was easy to retrieve the ball in a basketball game.

I must have a point, right? Actually, I have two.
First, I bet some of the younger guys said, I'm tired of moving the ladder, let's put a hinge on the basket. Then, some even younger guys said,
let's just cut a hole in the basket, all right?
Second, even though they probably said it about three days after they started playing, it took a long time till the innovations were accomplished.
And that's because the, uh, more mature, established players liked the game just fine the way it was.

We look back now, 100 years later, and we can't imagine having a basketball hoop with a bottom, and we can't imagine it took eleven years to innovate those two simple changes. From our perspective, these things were no-brainers. And yet, there are probably twenty-five things in your company right now that have been in need of innovating, about which you are dragging your feet. This has the net effect of dragging down your profit, as well. So much of our business is kept back in the stone-age, even though it is inevitable that the changes will occur. Why wait? Make the changes. If a computer is inevitable, what are you waiting for? If a website is inevitable, what are you waiting for?
I know why, really, I do. Change is hard as you get, uh, more mature. Keep this in mind, though. Things are going to change around you, no matter how much you drag your feet. It's time you re-joined the revolution you started when you began your career. The net effect will only be more money in your pocket.What's wrong with retiring richer and earlier? Listen to the younger members of the staff. They are holding a net in their hands right now.

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