More Than A Game! - Team Sport & Its Influence On Corporate Business

‘Sports’ is becoming an industry while the corporate world is being asked to get ‘sporty’ in its strategies and operations. Here’s a perspective on that!

- Y Shekar

Think of a sport and one can imagine action, excitement, challenge and result … if you are a follower! For the player, it means skilling and training, dedication and application, fitness, competitive performance and recognition. For the organizers and sponsors, ‘sports’ is a means of providing a memorable experience that’s entertaining and commercially viable. ‘Sports’ has ceased to be just a game, it is an enterprise! It is an organization with mission and objectives; an organization whose ecosystem of specialized entities that provide necessary inputs and support is evolving; an organization that is in the process of offering its products in a commercially viable manner. Therefore, it is adopting practices, processes, and governance from the corporate world…just like an organization that creates world class products and services for its target audiences.

In India, ‘sports’ is a start-up enterprise. But for Cricket, all other sporting events are getting their initial funding through ‘friends, family and fools’! The success of cricket in its IPL format is the Unicorn that holds the beacon for all other games, especially for the team sports. ‘Sports’ is the new sunrise industry that is learning business techniques from existing industries while offering some very interesting pointers on how business needs to be done in future when technologies like AI and robotics would have caused an impact.

Strange as it may sound, ‘sports’ is getting business funding now to become an industry while the corporate world is being asked to get ‘sporty’ in its strategies and operations as machines start doing activities that human beings are currently performing. Here’s a perspective on that.