Leonardo da WHO?

Knute Rockne would have you believe there’s a direct connection between success in football and success in business, but since he’s dead you’ll have to believe me. There is a direct connection between success in football and success in business.

However, the direct connection is not always the one you think.

Here; let me explain.

A week ago the home team, the Wisconsin Badgers, played in the Rose Bowl against the mighty Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University.

Now, far be it from me to disparage the institution that brought the football world Doak Walker and Sammy Baugh (not to mention Tonsillitis Johnson and Artis Toothis from Dan Jenkins’ delightful quasi-sequel to Semi-Tough, Life Its Ownself). However, Wisconsin didn’t exactly put its best foot forward in Pasadena.

The mighty mighty Badgers made it to the Rose Bowl by virtue of the off-tackle play and pretty much just the off-tackle play. You can read more about that over in the football blog (football-1-stick-gum.blogspot.com), but the idea is that Wisconsin built up a Rembrandt offense – painting and only painting, and furthermore only paintings of the off-tackle play.

The problem with that is Paul Chryst, the Badgers’ offensive coordinator, wasn’t happy being Rembrandt and running a Rembrandt offense. He wanted to be Leonardo da Vinci and invent the helicopter, too. He wanted to run bubble screens and skinny posts and toss sweeps just to show he could, and he wound up losing the most important game of his life because he couldn’t just face facts and be Rembrandt.

In terms of his job, Paul Chryst makes a great Rembrandt but a lousy Leonardo, and that got me thinking: What do you do as a marketing professional when a genuine Leonardo appears in your midst?

You know the marketing type: the person who can bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan, the person not only equally adept at research and product design and creative, but so overdept that they’re better at all three things than any one person in your department is good at one of them.

The easy answer is just to defer to them and let them do everything. That’s what I do, for I love the easy answer the way a wino loves muscatel.

However, I also acknowledge there are big problems with that, starting with the fact that letting them do everything runs like Cam Newton over every process and workflow in your organization.

Now, workflows and processes and I get along about as well as Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck, but I have to say if you want your own personal series called The Office renewed it’s probably not the best idea to ignore them entirely, even in the face of greatness.

The trick is to maximize use of your renaissance person’s skills without pushing aside everyone else in your department, and fostering the impression that you respect The Way Things Get Done Around Here, even if The Way Things Get Done Around Here is that nothing gets done around here.

Unfortunately, there’s no shining path to enlightenment in a case like this. What you do depends on the temperament of the individual, the collective mood of the department, and the culture of the organization as a whole.

It’s important that the factors be considered in that order, though, starting with the individual. The No. 1 question is whether you want this person in your department long-term. I know the temptation is to say, “This person is a fargin’ genius! Why would I not want them in my department?”

Because they know they’re a fargin’ genius, for one. Because their fargin’ geniusness disrupts everyone around them, for another. Because what your department and your organization needs right now is not genius but order – and there are times even an old chaos-theory guy like myself would take order over brilliance. When an advertising campaign has already been launched and simply needs to be maintained, for instance. When there’s a whole lot of gruntwork to be done and a shortage of grunts, for another. Geniuses tend to rebel at gruntwork, or do it so haphazardly you’d think it was done by a goat – and not one of the better-educated goats.

 Assuming the renaissance individual is capable of working productively in a team setting, the next step is to build a department so that everyone’s happy and the best talents are best utilized.

I’m a big proponent of ownership. I believe an organization functions most effectively when everyone is given ownership of a piece. It can be a tiny piece, but it’s theirs and they have control over every phase of it – including deciding where the money is going to be spent. If you own the hood ornament on the company limo and you’re given the power to spend money on its upkeep, you’re going make sure it’s the best hood ornament in the universe, even better than the Petty Girl ornaments on the old Nashes.

As it applies to the renaissance individual, give them a little piece of everything from your department – or better yet, give them ownership of one entire marketing program, top to bottom, start to finish. Remember Standard Oil; vertical integration can work even better than horizontal integration in the proper setting.

Organizations are sort of the anti-Paul Chryst. They refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a Leonardo in their midst. It’s understandable; organizational behavior is all about predictability, and genius is by nature unpredictable.

Given that, if a master of all trades should materialize in your midst like The Last Mimzy the best approach may be to pretend to the organization that such a phenom does not exist at all. It certainly expedites things. Things have come to a pretty pass when you have to hide such a light under a bushel, but considering that most organizations operate by shoving people into silos it’s not unexpected.

So to bring it all back home, the connection between success in football and success in business is in recognizing your Rembrandts and your da Vincis, and not allowing one to be the other.

Good luck with that. And Go Badgers!