In the first book, The Wave, we document a few of the early movers in the New Wave mentality:
Chicago Steel
The Hinkie Era 76’ers
Toronto Maple Leafs
Red Bull Soccer and Hockey
Let’s add Baylor football to the list of AD’s that “have a clue.” And their leader, Dave Aranda, also “gets it.”
The Baylor Basics
If you’re interested, here’s the complete article.
If not, I’ll tee up what we need for the rest of my piece.
Here’s a quick half-life summary of relevant points:
Aranda is a big time DC at LSU
They win a championship so other bad teams want to steal LSU’s people
Aranda gets interviewed by Baylor and other less good teams because AD’s “think” they want him
Aranda blows Baylor’s AD away on a phone call and at this point, they like him more than they thought
The recruiting process to hire Aranda at Baylor intensifies
That’s about all you need to know. But I really recommend you read the entire article.
The AD’s comments stick out to me. Aranda was a big-time Defensive Coordinator at LSU. When you’re at a program like that, everyone “thinks” they know you. Baylor’s AD addressed this. My buddy Kevin DM’d me and he says it better than I can:
I really like that he addressed that he thought he knew who he was and was blown away when he really figured him out. Makes me think how lucky the AD got. He called Aranda because he “thought” he knew him. And then realized he was better than expected. And just how it’s usually the opposite. Where people hiring think they know what they’re getting and turns out they are different.
I always talk about the idea of building on top of the previous comment like great improv practitioners know.
Kevin built the scaffolding here for me to build something better. Connecting to a framework/mental model from the business world.
Value Proposition vs. Customer Motivation
I don’t claim to be a business guy so I had to do some digging on these words myself. But Shreyas Doshi(who you will meet in my 2nd book) comes in with a great primer for what we will dive into:
You might be saying, “okay, great. I still don’t really have a clue.”
Not to worry. Think of it this way. These will serve as a definition in some sense.
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