Keep Your Job
“Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history…” -Winston Churchhill
Sam Hinkie is one of my heroes.1
Hinkie was the General Manager of the Philadelphia 76ers from 2013-2016. And if Billy Beane’s story via Moneyball is how a sports executive can be made into a folk hero, Hinkie’s story, what many refer to as “The Process,” is more akin to a tragedy.2
When Sam Hinkie took over the 76ers, he was extolled as a brilliant executive who would reinvent basketball.3 However, Hinkie’s rebuilding strategy required that the 76ers lose many games early to acquire the players that would allow them to win later. Before anyone had the chance to know whether or not this strategy worked, Hinkie resigned.
Hinkie’s story is a powerful case study about what happens when ideas that may be too bold conflict with messy organizational politics. In an interview following his departure, Hinkie argues that given the choice between innovation and job security, he would always choose innovation:
"So many of my friends will tell me, 'Don't do that. Don't try that. It's going to end poorly. They'll run you out…And that's the reason to do it, because fear has been the motivating factor for way too many people for way too long. There's a huge agency problem in the whole business, particularly in my role: Keep the job."4
Sadly, we will never know whether or not Hinkie was right, and several post-tenure critiques of Hinkie make clear that we should not blindly label him as a misunderstood genius. But suppose you enter September pondering a career change, a tense contract negotiation, or organizational impatience. In that case, it’s time to think about Hinkie’s legacy and what it means when innovation conflicts with “keeping the job.”
Matching Law
How do you know if you are making a difference?
Your answer likely corresponds with your personality style.
For data-focused people, key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboards might define success. Others might be more feeling-oriented and point to positive reinforcement from employees, constituents, and donors. Still, others may go highly tactile and point to whether or not they are on the receiving end of a long-contract extension or bonus.
However, no matter your style, once you decide how you measure success, you will act in a way that maximizes that measurement of success.
And this is where the trouble starts.
In 1961, psychologist Richard Herrnstein found that a “precise correspondence between relative frequency of responding and relative frequency of reinforcement arises from the function relating absolute frequency of responding and absolute frequency of reinforcement.”5
(Now in English…)
Herrnstein’s statement becomes known as the “matching law,” the idea that over time, people align how they spend their time with the rewards they receive. If what we spend our time on generates rewards, we will spend more time on that activity. If what we spend our time on generates losses, we will spend less time on that activity.
However, humans tend to focus more on the value derived from short-term gains over benefits gained over time. As such, we are naturally inclined to see the benefit derived from spending $5 on something now over saving that $5 for retirement 50 years from now. Not only do we tend to see things this way, but we will strive to match our efforts so that our time and benefits will precisely align. And seldom are the fun things we could be doing now the same as the largely “unfun” things we will do behind the scenes to get a much bigger reward later.
Turning to sports, fans hate losing. And if a team has enough money, they can sign enough above-average players to keep the team competitive. However, no sport is more dependent on star players than basketball, and having one LeBron James-caliber player or not having one is almost always the difference between being a title contender and merely being good.6
Sam Hinkie knew this better than most, and his strategy was based on the idea that the more the 76ers lost now, the more opportunities they would get to draft players at the beginning of the NBA draft, thereby increasing their chances of landing the kind of star players that lead to championships.7 However, all constituencies want to feel like the time and money they spend on their team corresponds to a simultaneous reward. When the reward is not immediately forthcoming, people get impatient.8
But it’s not all bad news. The caveat to Hinkie as a cautionary tale is that if leaders can help people see into the future, it becomes possible to beat some of the inclinations of the matching law.
The Optimist’s Telescope
When I first learned about the matching law, I thought, “This totally explains why fighting climate change is so hard.” I want the rewards of fossil fuels now, and it’s hard to see how sacrificing those small rewards now is necessary for much bigger rewards later (or avert much greater losses.)
Bina Venkataraman knows far more about this topic than I do and wants to help myopic people like me. Venkataraman was a climate change advisor to President Barack Obama, and her book The Optimist’s Telescope provides a primer on overcoming the matching law in various sectors of modern life.
Venkataraman sympathizes with the human condition and recognizes that what lies in the future is “murky, mutable, and uncertain.”9 But while sometimes it is wonderful to imagine the future when we are excited, it can be frightening to think about our future selves when we are afraid:
“When we’re looking forward to something- a picnic with friends, a vacation, a wedding day- most people find it easier to imagine the future. We want to see ourselves in that moment, and so we let our minds wander there when we have the time. But when we dread something-doing our taxes, getting older, the rising seas, or a coming refugee crisis-most of us don’t want to inhabit that future. Even if we fixate on it, we often find it anxiety-inducing or even paralyzing, because we wish it were not coming at all.”10
Short-term gains excite people, whereas long-term gains are theoretical, and the difficulty of getting people to buy into the theory compounds when, in the short term, they must accept losses. As a result, it is often easier to avoid staring into the abyss and see things one would rather ignore.
The Optimist’s Telescope offers a variety of tools to address this challenge, but my favorite is encouraging people to visualize the future with a twist. Instead of visualizing an idealistic way that our plans will go, Venkataraman asks us first to visualize “a coming earthquake or storm,” literal or figurative, and then imagine “how we could handle whatever we face.”11
In practical terms, pretend you are a new CEO tasked with turning around a moribund organization. A realistic visualization of moving the organization from weakness to strength will likely require looking at some of the unpleasant tasks you will need to do in the short term, such as budget cuts, staffing transitions, and programmatic change. These kinds of future actions make people nervous and lead to avoidance.
However, what if you imagined a future where you made those changes and that you the pathway you took to overcome the challenges and make it out the other side? All of a sudden, you are creating a new mental model that is both realistic and optimistic. And creating a new mental model for yourself is the first step to communicating that pathway to others.
Looking back, Hinkie acknowledges that his biggest mistake was not his goals for the 76ers, but his lack of honest communication with the public about what it would take to win, stating that “I can’t afford to be quiet all the time.” Many leaders make this mistake, but it need not be that way.
What Could Go Right?
What I Read This Week
Screen Apnea: Another way that technology’s impact should freak us out. I say this as I write this week’s issue in front of four monitors at my desk…
Anti-Racists Are Over-Correcting: Understanding my racism requires a special kind of humility. I need to recognize the power of inherent biases while not alienating people in my journey toward greater tolerance. This article really got me thinking.
Rethinking Nonprofit Resilience: I love resilience, but I get that there is an extent to which resilience can be used as an excuse for not challenging systems of oppression. Read this analysis by Nonprofit AF.
The Booming Business of Anxiety: Anxiety is no small thing, and let me clear that it’s a serious issue requiring serious interventions. I would encourage you to read this article about how increases in anxiety have led to businesses filling the need that may not be ideal “solutions” to the problem.
Don’t Feed the Zombies: I will let you read the article and see what this is about. Clickbait is amazing.
76ers fans, please hold your breath before jumping to conclusions. Ultimately, we will never know whether or not Hinkie was right.
For books on this subject, consider reading Yaron Weitzman’s Tanking to the Top or Jake Fischer’s Built to Lose. I’ve read both books, and the short summary of each is that the question of whether or not Hinkie was “right” is left unanswered.
Nilkanth Patel, “Sam Hinkie and the Analytics Revolution in Basketball,” The New Yorker, 17 May 2013.
Jordan Brenner, “The man who just can’t win: Sam Hinkie (finally) speaks,” ESPN the Magazine, 29 June 2016.
If you wonder why Hinkie is one of my heroes, it is this quote. He names what so few are willing to say, which is many leaders are not acting to help their organizations be successful so much as they are acting to keep their jobs.
R.J. Herrnstein, “Relative and absolute strength of response as a function of frequency of reinforcement,” in Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Volume 4, Issue 3 (July 1961), 272.
If you need proof, take a look at this chart that outlines how many titles have been won by each NBA franchise. In almost every case, the team that won the title has at least one top-five player in the NBA (and usually 2-3 or top-ten or top-20 players).
However, if you are a suffering fan of the Anaheim Angels, you will undoubtedly know that your team has two of the best baseball players of the last ten years, Mike Trout and Shohei Otani, and has not sniffed a World Series title during either of their careers.
The counter-argument about this is that while it may be necessary to sacrifice some winning now to win more later, there is no need to make a team unwatchable in order to achieve that goal. It’s a fair point. Watch this:
Unless you are an Orioles fan…
I LOVED that Mike Elias tanked his first few years as our General Manager because if he had not we would have not have Gunner Henderson, Jackson Holliday, and a number of incredible young players that brought me winning baseball for the first time in a while.
Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019), 5.
Ibid.
Ibid., 30.