Social Responsibility

After a very nice visit yesterday to St James' Park, the home stadium of Newcastle United, today we had another inspiring lecture from Emir Turam about social responsibility. Our group with former athletes is getting great input to add necessary knowledge and skills to advance from playing basketball towards creating value in other parts of life and business. As former top players we have very important advantages and some disadvantages. We work hard on them to improve and we get good support.

Michael Jordan has been a great and inspiring example as a player, but he had also struggles to make the transfer from being a player to a businessman. Also here he didn't take the safe route and learned maybe even more in that period than he learned as a player. He also got more comfortable to show his vulnerability during this process than at a younger age. For me it looked like he reached the next level of flying and became a greater inspiration source. Just because he showed that adjusting to competing in different platforms of life after a top level sports career can be quite difficult.

Creating value by focussing on social responsibility is often, from a business point of view, looked at as a soft and superficial window-dressing and it distracts from the fundamental economic role of business. But great companies and organisations know that "the continuing commitment by business to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workfoce and their families as well as the local community and society at large". And they act by it, because social responsibility is a duty every individual or organisation has to perform so as to maintain a balance between the economy and the ecosystem.

Sports can be a special factor in global ecosystem if we take a political and humanitarian point of view. In relationships between countries sometimes it might seem that sports and competition increases nationalism and the distance between different countries. But the experience and research shows that for instance the Olympic Games really has much positive influence on Mutual relationships between countries. Maybe the visit of Dennis Rodman to North Korea will also pay off...