ESPN The Company: The Story and Lessons Behind the Most Fanatical Brand in Sports (Hardcover)

~ Anthony F. Smith (Author), Keith Hollihan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

A fascinating look at ESPN and its success as a brand

ESPN The Company reveals the inside scoop on the biggest business story in sports, detailing the creative and innovative spirit and practices that drove the programming, products, and services of the most powerful and prominent name in sports media. The authors provide a behind-the-scenes perspective on how ESPN dealt with their many partners and how they handled mistakes and missteps along the way-from the humble beginnings of ESPN as an underrated startup to the pinnacle of their success as a major industry player.

ESPN and other great organizations invest in their people. They train them. They believe that if you spend the time and resources turning talented performers into leaders, you're going to get better organizational performance and engender higher levels of commitment and sweat. ESPN The Company

• Explores the dedication to excellence that makes ESPN the "Worldwide Leader in Sports"
• Reveals how the steps ESPN has taken to excel can be applied to whatever type of business you're in
• Shares the lessons learned at ESPN about launching and growing a wildly successful enterprise

Engaging and informative, this entertaining guide reveals how any company can benefit by embracing the best practices of ESPN.

From the Inside Flap

Thirty years ago, TV sports coverage was produced as a sidebar unworthy of serious news time. Game highlights, such as they were, usually consisted of scores and brief recaps crammed into a few minutes between news and weather on your local television channel. That all changed when Bill Rasmussen, an unemployed sports announcer in 1979, and a group of committed sports junkies in Bristol, Connecticut, decided to lease unwanted satellite time to broadcast some local college sports and minor league hockey games. They called their organization the Entertainment & Sports Programming Network which we know today as ESPN, the most powerful and prominent name in sports media, with twenty-seven satellite dishes feeding more than 97 million subscribers. How did Connecticut become the center of the sports universe?

ESPN The Company tells the fascinating story of how ESPN managed to sustain its growth, innovation, and brand in a highly competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace. Based on over twenty years of consulting inside ESPN, Smith provides the reader with firsthand observations, experiences, and research, which reveals for the first time an inside look and feel for the type of organizational psychology and culture that exists at all levels of ESPN. The authors detail four distinct stages in the company's development that the company has gone through illuminating how ESPN's business decisions and accomplishments can be understood in the context of the company's evolution. We ultimately learn that at the heart of ESPN's success is one astoundingly simple principle: serve fans.

After each chapter, the authors share the lessons learned at ESPN about launching and growing a wildly successful enterprise—all the while enhancing economic and human value. The lessons are rich and applicable anywhere, and if you're a fan of business, competition, or sports, you'll enjoy reading and learning from this book.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (September 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 047054211X
• ISBN-13: 978-0470542118
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #261,101 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm Not Big on Sports or ESPN, but I Loved It!, January 7, 2010

By	Drea Knufken (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews

It's hard for your average author to effectively chronicle a company's growth. You have to draw out lessons and patterns from decades of details. You have to put your own biases aside to tell the story as it was. At the same time, you need to make readers understand the importance of how the company handled the challenges inherent to its evolution.

It takes the right combination of mind and skills to pull this kind of thing off. And that's exactly what authors Anthony F. Smith and Keith Hollihan manage to do in "ESPN: The Company."

"ESPN: The Company" pulls you into life at ESPN through vivid character and company descriptions. You learn by vicariously participating.

That's what consultant Anthony F. Smith did during his 20+-year tenure with ESPN, though he experienced the company firsthand. He joined with McKinsey just as ESPN was gaining traction as a startup. He stayed all the way through to its current incarnation as a $30 billion sports media giant.

In those years, he grew intimate with the people, culture, and strategy of ESPN. He and cowriter Keith Hollihan chronicle the highlights of those years: The prominent personalities within the company, the victories and losses, and the lessons learned.

Each of the book's eight chapters covers a guiding principle to ESPN's success. Those guiding principles helped ESPN evolve from idea to empire, but could be applied to any company wanting to stay competitive and creative while ascending competitive ladder.

Individually, each principle can be applied to any company. Taken together, though, they are the unique formula that led to ESPN's success.

Principles include:

*Turn Fanatics into Fans: Make your business all about the customer, and hire fanatics to work for you.

*Think like an incumbent, but act like a challenger: Let your innate insecurities drive your achievement. Believing you are the best while being driven by doubts can be a good thing.

*Find the right leader at the right time: Every stage of an organization demands a different type of leadership. Surround yourself with other leaders who compensate for your weaknesses.

*Expand your brand: Let your mission drive your brand, not vice-versa. Protect the brand more aggressively than you expand it.

While chronicling ESPN's story, Smith also explains how it developed and kept its winning formula. For example, ESPN started up with a hungry, passionate, hardworking culture. Smith explains how they were able to keep it intact even after they grew large.

Smith also details how the company created the markets it now dominates. In another, especially strong chapter, he describes how each of the company's leaders contributed to the right growth at the right time. He also breaks down how ESPN harnessed its employees' and fans' passion to gain business wins.

These are lesson every business should learn.

"ESPN: The Company" rewards readers with company intimacy and wisdom. The authors incorporate tidbits from a variety of sources to add nuance to the story. These include quotes, anecdotes, cable TV industry history, anthropology, and organizational science.

This richness helps you feel like you're participating in ESPN's story. You come out of each chapter having learned through your reading experience. The authors recap lessons in a short summation at the end of each chapter. The book's tone, while deeply respectful of ESPN, doesn't make bones about the contentious aspects of the company's growth.

Conclusion: The book's a winner.

A book is a success when it makes you respect a company you formerly knew little about. It is a success when you feel like you've experienced, rather than read, the story within. Ditto if it makes you want to read more of the authors' work.

ESPN: The Company did all three for me. I highly recommend it.

(Review by Drea Knufken)

5.0 out of 5 stars Can't Put It Down, October 27, 2009

By	John Gates - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Pick up "ESPN: The Company" and just begin reading it. If you are at all like me, you will find that you can't put it down. This book has all the ingredients of a truly great business book: A hugely successful company, a world-famous brand, a hyper-competitive landscape, a wild ride through the four stages of ESPN's development described by the author, and fascinating and amazingly diverse leaders. And, of course, the "insider/outsider" perspective that author Tony Smith brings to the story. As the primary management consultant to ESPN for 20 years, Tony is in the unique position of being able to reflect in a very compelling way not only the history of the organization, but also the culture -- the stories, the values, the very sense of the place. At the same time, the author does a good job of keeping his obvious admiration for the story's key players in check. We learn, for example, not only about CEO George Bodenheimer's "calm, reassuring, purposeful" leadership style, but also his conflict averse nature; about former CEO Steve Bornstein's extraordinary intelligence and strategic acumen, but also his tendency to "strip people down in a New York minute." As with his first book, "The Taboos of Leadership," Tony seeks at all times to "keep it real." If you are a business-person wondering what to read on that next long flight, you will find that this book resonates, educates, and even entertains.

5.0 out of 5 stars Inside scoop on the growth of a great Sports Network - ESPN, October 18, 2009

By	Bob Salt "sports fan" (Leucadia, CA) - See all my reviews

As a big sports enthusiast and a businessman, I thoroughly enjoyed ESPN The Company! I found the passion of ESPN's founders, as well as their employees and all future leaders to be inspirational. For a growing company to maintain, and improve on, the original commitment to the sports fan is truly impressive. What dedicated adherence to the key core value! As business leaders all know, it is very difficult to stay focused and maintain strategies and corporate cultures over time. To do so over 30 years, with multiple CEO's across an ever-evolving cable environment and sports markets is the true lesson in this book. Each CEO brought his own skill sets and strengths that were perfect for the stage of growth the company was gong through at the time.

As a sports fan it is interesting to learn about the story of how the network expanded their offerings - and the actions that transpired at all levels to make this commitment work. The business lessons Anthony Smith shares throughout this book offer powerful insights business leaders can tap into for instilling or enhancing their own commitment to their employees, customers and markets.

Sports fans and business leaders will both enjoy and benefit from the story and strategies in this excellent book!