Cal Should Learn From Jack

Jack Welch was right about a lot of things. It was Jack who said:

If you don't have a competitive advantage don't compete.

And:

The team with the best players wins.

He was also clear about adaptability:

An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Lastly, at least for now, Jack was steadfast about winning. His mantra while at GE was that 'success' could be defined as being the #1 or #2 player in your market. Anything else was failure. Businesses Jack ran that failed to become and remain the #1 or #2 player in their market were either sold or disbanded.

A great teacher, a believer in the power of people, an inspiring leader.

Too bad my alma mater hasn't learned a thing from him.

The University of California at Berkeley is, arguably, one of the top 5 public universities in the United States. U.S. News & World Report last year proclaimed Cal the top public university in the country. Its Graduate School Survey stated that Berkeley was the only university to achieve top 5 rankings in all of the Ph.D. disciplines included in the study.

The faculty, researchers and alumni account for 65 Nobel Laureates. Teams led at Berkeley by Glenn T. Seaborg (Ph.D., Berkeley, 1937) have discovered, at last count, 12 chemical elements, including Americium, Berkelium and Californium. (A nice tradition among physicists: Discover an element and you name it.) Indeed, nearly all of the elements filling the bottom row of the Periodic Table were discovered at Berkeley or by Berkeley-educated physicists.

Berkeley, of course, has also been the hotbed of political thinking. From Mario Savio leading the Free Speech Movement in the '60s to the protests against our involvement in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and the People's Park riots of the '70s, Berkeley is synonymous with radicalism or, as we who know the university well prefer to think, a willingness to speak out and act when speaking out and acting are needed.

And speaking of acting, Gregory Peck was a Berkeley alum. As was Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. As were the founders or co-founders of such companies as: Apple, Intel, LSI Logic, The Gap, MySpace, PowerBar, Chez Panisse, MoveOn.org, Scharffen Berger Chocolate, Sun Microsystems, and The Learning Company.

Unfortunately, Cal's tradition of academic excellence is not matched -- not even remotely -- by its performance in athletics. Aside from its men's rugby club (with 24 national championships) and its men's water polo team (with 13), the university has a long and deep history of failure in sports. Actually, 'failure' doesn't even begin to describe it when the two big money sports -- football and basketball -- are considered. 'Woeful inadequacy' comes closer. Better yet is 'heart-ripped-painfully-and-traumatically-from-one's-chest-every-damn-year'.

Of what do I speak? Cal plays in the Pac 10, competing with 9 other schools in the conference. The winner of the conference plays in the Rose Bowl. Cal's last appearance in the Rose Bowl? 1959, losing to Iowa. The last time they won the Rose Bowl? 1938 against Alabama.

Think about that for a minute. All things equal, what are the odds of a team ending the season at the top of a 10-team conference? Right. 1 in 10. So, all things equal, you might expect a team to win the conference every 10 years or so. (Of course all things are not equal. The Pac 10 also contains USC, the only remaining professional football team in Los Angeles. Watch the news over the next week or two. You'll see yet again to what I refer.) But the Pac 10 didn't always contain 10 teams. It used to have only 8, significantly improving the probability of any one team winning the conference. Even so, Cal's last Pac 10 championship and appearance in the Rose Bowl was over 50 years ago.

And what about national championships? The last time Cal football was a national champion was, ready?, in 1922 when it shared the honor with none other than Cornell and Princeton. What good times those must have been when Cal, Cornell and Princeton -- top academic institutions -- were the kings of football!

The story of Cal's men's basketball program is only slightly better. Cal last won the conference in 1960 -- when it was the Pac 8! The previous year, a Pete Newell-led Cal team won the National Championship beating West Virginia 71-70.

Cal certainly had things going in sports in 1959. Too bad they've done almost nothing in the last 50 years.

And that's precisely to my point. Jack was right. If you can't become and remain a #1 or #2 player in the market, get out. It's time Cal listened. It's time Cal got out of the business of football and basketball.

Admit it Cal, you just don't know how to produce winners in football and basketball. You can't even produce teams that regularly finish #2. You've had 50 years to learn this important lesson. How much longer do you need? And as painful as it is for me to say this, being a football season ticket holder since I taught at Berkeley in the '80s, it's time to hang up the football spikes and basketball sneakers.

Do the right thing, Cal. Put a fork in your football and basketball programs. Save the money you're investing in athletes who continue to graduate with degrees in 'American Studies', whatever that is, should they even stay that long before transferring, dropping out or opting for the NFL draft. Save the money you're paying coaches who have not gotten the best players, have not adapted, and, as a result, do not have a competitive advantage.

And consider this: Memorial Stadium, the home of my beloved California Golden Bear football team, is being torn in half by the Hayward Fault. The fault runs downs the middle of the field from end zone to end zone and is slowly but surely pulling the east side of the stadium in the opposite direction from the west side of the stadium. Talk about an absolutely clear and unavoidable sign that the program was not meant to be!

There's no shame in trying and failing, Cal. There is shame in being too stupid to learn from 50 years of futility. Put us all out of our misery. Please. Even real golden bears exhibit greater intelligence.

Unless, of course, you can produce a winner sometime during my lifetime.