Mark Murphy analyzes Bruce Levenson's email that forced the Atlanta Hawks owner to sell his stake. Levenson skipped facts and jumped straight to interpretation, turning demographic data into a politically charged statement. Murphy says the hastily written memo, filled with conjecture and informal rambling, destroyed his reputation despite the financial gain from the sale.
Chapters
Mark Murphy is the founder and chief exec of Leadership IQ, joins me now. Mark, good to see you, sir.
Good to see you, Richard.
The core issue here— we can put to one side whether he's racist or not in his own views, we don't know— but the core point here is you have a chief exec who had perceived a problem. What did he do wrong?
The big issue he did wrong is that if you think of every conversation as basically having 3 levels, facts, interpretations, and reactions. What he did was he kind of skipped over the facts and went to the interpretations and reactions. If he had said, you know, in the email he said, my unscientific poll says there's 40% of the audience is black. Well, if he had said, you know, we just did some market research and here are the facts that we found, here are some statistics. Every company on earth does demographic analyses, but he took it a step further. He left the facts, didn't have many to begin with, and lived in a world of conjecture and interpretation.
When I read the I read it in its entirety. There were certain ill-chosen sentences. I'm sure you've read the email. But the fundamental point as a chief exec he was making is we've got to do something to get higher spenders. And I don't believe that the demographic we're currently appealing to is that demographic.
If he had said— so the first half of what you just said, I believe we have to get higher spenders at the audience. When he said in the email, for example, that our food and beverage sales are down, our— the thrash The Atlanta Thrashers, the hockey team, made more money off of concession sales than the Atlanta Hawks did. That's all factual. And in that area, he's actually quite safe. When he takes it the next step, it wasn't the fundamental premise. It was the next step that got him in trouble.
Pause there for one second, though. Pause there. CNN's Martin Savage spoke to the chief exec of the Atlanta Hawks, Steve Koonin, and asked him what led Levinson to sell his stake in the team.
There was an investigation, and the investigation was coming to an end. And the NBA, rather than fight, Bruce said, I am putting my interest up for sale and I am walking away.
And that's exactly what it sounds like, that I'm just walking away, that there's no real repercussion for him. He sells the team, but he'll make money.
He will make money. That is an outcome of this. I do think there's significant repercussions for him. I don't think we'd be sitting here night talking in our practice gym, and I don't think people would know the name Bruce Levinson. It wouldn't— I think people would not have the feelings and emotions that they do about Bruce. And I think there are severe repercussions, and I think he is paying. You know, the only thing we all have in our life is our reputation, and his was damaged today by him, not by anyone else.
The— it was damaged, it was— some arguably would say destroyed. What you're saying is it didn't need to be this way, even if his analysis of the issue was right?
If he had written the memo and said, listen, folks, here's the demographic analysis, here's the spend, here's where we're low, here's where we're high, and left it there, he would have actually been okay.
But somebody somewhere along the line would have had to raise that question of the demographic in the auditorium or in the arena.
Yes.
And somebody might have had to come to that same conclusion.
Somebody might have come to the same conclusion, but if you had done it in a private conversation as opposed to the email, and this is kind of the big lesson for CEOs, you are very much a political leader. So when you write this stuff down, and the email was actually sent from his iPad, it wasn't, it didn't spell, you know, capitalization, the I was all lowercase, it was a hastily written email. He closes it by saying, "I know I'm rambling here." A CEO as a political leader does not have the opportunity to write an email that closes with, I know I'm rambling here. It's, it's not the day and age we live in. You're not allowed to do that.
That's fascinating. That's really the nub of it. Thank you, sir.
