Creating Excitement

Watching the NCAA tourney this past weekend and my mind drifted to teams past.  My bracket is totally busted.  Why couldn’t Loyola lay an egg last week?

Watching Loyola play today made me think of Marquette.  When Al McGuire was at Marquette, he knew how to create excitement.  Nothing was generic about Marquette.  When you look at a lot of college programs today they all look relatively the same.  “fill in the color” outs.  Their courts are painted similarly.  If they have a legendary coach, they name the court after them.

McGuire created real excitement.  Marquette had crazy uniforms and warmups, some pictured above.  They changed them frequently.  They played at Milwaukie County and it was nicknamed MECCA.  Robert Indiana a pop artist painted their court.  I remember the first time I saw it on television.  We went out with chalk and colored our driveway.

McGuire himself was colorful. If you are old enough and had the pleasure of listening to him call a college game on television back in the day you got a taste of what he was like.  Every modern broadcast pays homage to him in some way. He made the weekly mundane game exciting.

Coaches all sort of look alike today.  They wear the same stuff.  Not Al.  He could wear the blue blazer but he’d put on a colorful sport coat or a leisure suit.  A lot of times, he wasn’t even at the daily practice coaching.   I doubt seriously in the more corporate environment that exists today if a guy like McGuire could survive.  Social media itself would eat him alive.

However, I don’t doubt that he wouldn’t have been successful. When people think differently, they attract people that think differently.

When you run a startup, or a company, sometimes you need to figure out how to create excitement.  The day-to-day grind can be mundane and predictable.  That’s why managers like Joe Maddon are such a breath of fresh air.

You will see hype affect the valuations of things.  It happens all the time in the stock market, housing, and futures markets. It happens in crypto.  How much of the rally in Gamestop ($GME) was just because of the hype?  Recently, I have been watching Helium rally.  I bought a miner back in 2019 and looked at it as an interesting experiment.  $HNT has rallied quite a bit and as the hype cycle has taken over, momentum has increased.

The key is the things you do to create excitement cannot be fake.  It’s got to be real and be a part of you.  It has to be fun.  Because after the “excitement” is created, it’s the culture and personality of the manager that sustains it.  A lot of stuff I see today is just plain vanilla.  People see right through that.

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