Change and basketball

I love basketball. I used to play a little bit of it as a varsity player for our high school team. Those were the days when height was not a major requirement for the game. I remember how the coach would laboriously tweak, adjust, and correct the way we dribble or shoot the ball, and I still remember how difficult was to change to the style he wanted. The resistance was always there until continuous training, discipline, rebuke, and a fair amount of warning forced us to change and improve our game.

Here is a story written by an anonymous writer which I have kept for a long time. It is a fascinating story about changes that happened in our country’s most revered sports.

“On the night of Dec. 30, 1936, a crowd of more than 17,500 turned out at the old Madison Square Garden in New York City to see Long Island University, the nation’s number-one basketball team with a 43-game winning streak, oppose Stanford, the defending Pacific Coast Conference champion. Stanford ended LIU’s winning streak with a 45­-11 victory, but something more important happened.

The crowd, in fact, had mostly come to see Hank Luisetti, Stanford’s 6-foot 2-inch, 185-pound sophomore. He was the only player known for shooting the ball with one hand while he hung in the air, in defiance of basketball style. Everyone else was shooting the old style: two-handed set shots or hook shots. The huge publicity celebrating Luisetti’s shooting style did not change the fact that the goal was putting the ball into the basket. However, it forever changed how the game was played, but not without stubborn resistance. The establishment felt it was not the right thing to do. “That’s not basketball,” Nat Holman, the fabled City College of New York coach, said at the time. “If my boys ever shot one-handed, I’d quit coaching.”

Luisetti was voted college player of the year in 1937 and 1938. He finished second to George Mikan in the Associated Press’s poll to select the best player of the first half of the 20th century. Hank Luisetti died on Dec. 17, 2002, living long enough to see his style perfected and embellished by the likes of Earl Monroe, Julius Erving, and, of course, Michael Jordan. Had somebody not had the courage to break convention, then basketball today would have remained static and boring.”

Throughout history you will see that resistance to change has always been there. Hindsight is 20-20 vision. Today as we look back, we find it humorous. Take for instance this story:

In the late 19th century, a controversy erupted among educators about a new American invention. For decades, students had used lead pencils in doing their work. But in 1880, a technological breakthrough came. For the first time, they began attaching rubber erasers on the ends of pencils.

This had never been done before. Many educators opposed the use of this newfangled pencil on the ground that it encouraged students to make mistakes. “Let them avoid errors in the first place, and they won’t need an eraser.”

When calculators were introduced, accounting and engineering professors were against the machine. The devices were prohibited entry into the classroom. One accounting professor proclaimed with passion and conviction that those who persist in using the calculator will become dumb. Of course, today, if you are not using the calculator you are already dumb. When was the last time you saw someone carrying the slide rule and algorithm to class? Hardly.

Technology today has accelerated the pace of change. Businesses that do not conform to change would surely be disrupted. I have been invited to speak on “Managing Change” and other related topics because there is resistance in my organizations to accept change.

I have been in the consultancy business for many years. I have done thousands of keynotes, seminars and trainings and am still active in the business. The advantage I have is that I have intentionally made friends with change. Rather than fighting, denying, or resisting it; I studied it, experimented with it, and then applied it. Today, I find myself still relevant and active doing very well in these fast-changing business landscapes.

Make change your friend. People who soar and succeed are those who refuse to live in the past, but whose eyes sparkle with the prospect of the future, embracing change along the way. As one popular speaker said, “Change before you are changed.”

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