Top 10 Influencers in The Business of Sports

We all love a good list. Last week Forbes released their annual list of most powerful celebrities. Earlier this year, Forbes also gave a rundown ofbaseball’s most valuable teams.

Another thing we love is sports analogies. The sports analogy is often used in business to emphasize goals, strategies, obstacles, personal motivation and teamwork.

Why? Because sports are a relatively common experience across many cultures. People understand sports at the basest level.

The power of sports is strong at the societal level as well. The ancient Greeks used the Olympics to keep a truce among their warring city-states. A majority of the planet slows down to watch the modern Olympics, the World Cup and the Super Bowl in the U.S.

This power also translates into the corporate environment as we implore our teams and our customers to achieve their objectives. Score a goal. Drain a three-pointer. Dunk it. Go long. ”Just do it.” ”Run like never before.” Win!

So if sports has such a strong hold over us, who influences the business of sports?  Do we even understand the power of influence?

So inspired by the top earning athletes report, I sought to understand the power of influence, to see how easily I could define the top 10 influencers in the business of sports. I’m not sure I answered the question to my satisfaction, but the journey offers some insight into the power and the challenge of identifying influence in our social world.

If Sports Influences Us, What Influences Sports?

Clearly, sports influences many of us. But what influences sports? Or more specifically, what influences the business of sports?

If you’ve read the book or watched Moneyball, you know the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s strategy to master the business of sports by fielding a superior team on a basement budget.

If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie where Billy is played by Brad Pitt, the hero uses advanced analysis and lots of stats to acquire players that are simply more effective but that other teams ignore based on irrelevant personality traits.

The approach works. The team makes it further in the playoffs than anyone expects and Billy Beane is offered a lucrative position at the Boston Red Sox. While he declines the offer, his approach is widely studied and copied by Major League baseball in the years that followed.

Billy Beane has influenced the business of sports by solving one of the biggest challenges in business: a focus on results at the expense of personal bias.

Is Influence the Moneyball of Marketing?

While Moneyball offers a best-selling, hollywood-produced answer (based on a true story), I wanted to understand which type of advanced analysis helps us to identify the top influencers in the business of sports.

But first I had to define influence. Altimeter analyst Brian Solis (@BrianSolis) and author of a book titled Engage defines “Influence: To cause effect or change behavior.”

He believes that influence is one of the hottest trends in social media and argues that effectiveness for marketing in the digital age comes down to therealization of influence. And a whole business has sprung up to measure influence and help us to “realize” it.

Full article can be seen here:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/05/23/top-10-influencers-in-the-business-of-sports/