The Value Of The Intangible Relationship…

Sports, at its core, is often viewed as a transactional business, a zero-sum game. After all, if you leave it for what it is, the score is there when the game ends. Somebody wins, somebody loses. However, the business that surrounds that score, that result, by those who actually play, is much more fluid. The intangible, personal results, go way beyond a score.

I am lucky to be constantly reminded of those intangibles by the people we come across, those who we have known for 20 seconds or 30 years, who remind you that if you do the right thing, wins are much more than the numbers on a scoreboard. These intangibles of impact have risen several times in the past week. The first was at our class on Monday night at Fordham. We had our friend Ray Negron come in and re-tell his life story with students who I felt needed to hear the impact doing little things can have on lives. Ray’s story, if you don’t know, can be read here, and it always has a deeply emotional impact when he tells it in his terms to young people. He makes them think and reflect. As many times as I hear Ray speak, I always walk away with another tidbit, because he rarely tells the same story the same way twice, and it is ever evolving. However, this time there was another lesson to be learned…an intangible…that Ray wrote about on his blog the day after. You can read “the rest of the story’ here, but it was a reminder of the why…of why we can have positive impact on people by doing the little things to unintentionally help them to reflect, grow and move on. I did not know Ray was suffering from the loss of several friends when he came to class…but that exercise in speaking and getting engaged with students was a worthwhile byproduct of showing up, listening, and learning, and growing a friendship. Lesson learned and reminded.

The second reminder of the value of intangibles came Saturday morning, when my friend and colleague Keith Green posted a story about the passing of Kathy Drysdale. Kathy in recent years might be best known as a former elite athlete who was the mother of Dallas Mavericks star Dereck Lively II.  We had all worked together in the 1990’s with the Philadelphia 76ers, at a time when the front offices of NBA teams were probably more intimate and less transactional than they are today. Keith had reminded me several years ago that when he went back and looked at a media guide…an actual printed book…from the time when we were there, the total number of front office employees for the team was less than 40…TOTAL. Now the basketball analytics departments of most teams probably approach 40 on their own.  

Who knew where all this would go, and the intangible impact relationships could have, whether you spoke or texted someone every day, every week, saw them every year, or followed their lives through others across the decades. Those shared experiences…in person experiences…are the ties that bind.

I raise these as just two examples of the path we end up on…paths that are long and winding, and some that are short and bumpy…but they are all part of the experience, and none of these experiences happen without showing up, listening and meeting actual people…in person, not behind a device with a piece of glass in front of it…as the be all that defines our relationships.

There are some people that do view this business as purely transactional. You do this for me, I pay for the service, I measure results. I have one colleague who works for one of those transactional Masters of the Universe who once told me that his big deal boss was going to build the ultimate high net worth networking event, and he needed some help identifying some folks to invite. The key was it had to be all based on how he can do enough business and extract something from the event. “He told me he has enough friends and doesn’t need any more, so if you can’t help him do a deal, he doesn’t need you.”

Sad to think that way, because you can never have enough friends, colleagues, relationships…because the chance encounter, the randomness of showing up, leads you to paths you never knew much more often than the well-orchestrated plan, and going those extra few feet can sometime be quite serendipitous.

I raise all this as I think about Ray and Kathy, and the paths their lives took. Was it a plan for Ray to work for the Yankees for over 50 years? No. Did Kathy envision while working in the ticket office in the basement of Veteran’s Stadium that she would one day proudly watch her son be drafted and play in the NBA? Probably not. But in both cases, and in hundreds of others I have seen and been a part of, those journeys do not take place without the people around you, ones you weren’t asking anything of other than to be a colleague and to go on the ride together.

It doesn’t all have to be about the transaction, because the relationships have more value than the dollars many times, and the payoffs, as I saw unknowingly with Ray this week, are priceless when you learn about the impact you can have.

Thanks to all for continuing to be part of my journey…the relationships never get old…they are gold.