["Tour of Champions" 2013]

This statement of his echos the very fabric of what a 501c3 is supposed to do on multiple levels concerning internal groups being responsible to help each other; especially the strong helping the weak.

I'm curious, not being argumentative, but is that exact language, or language similar to it, in DCI's actual mission statement, or written into their IRS classification statement as one of their purposes? If not, then I'm not sure anyone should be assuming that it's implied, since DCI isn't a a charitable organization designed to provide services to the community, but a non-profit sports league/co-op, there to provide financial return to their members.

And co-ops deliver return to their members at different rates all the time, so there's not necessarily a promise in there that simply appearing on DCi's list of 'members' guarantees everyone the same payout.

I don't know much about the "firing Dan A" elements of the backstory, but I'd agree with Danielray's assessment that DCI, if they want to grow, will probably have to start looking up the corporate ladder at one point or another. If they commit themselves to becoming a larger organization overall, they'll want executives who already have experience working on a larger level - perhaps not the top dog at an existing sports or event promotions company, but someone who is right near the top, and has both the experience and the connections to know how to build an audience. I'd strongly disagree with those who say you can't change public perceptions about what drum corps could be; if they think it's nothing but marching band, then maybe drum corps would have to evolve to offer them something that was clearly NOT marching band, and not 1960s drum corps either.

I have a feeling he's not a popular guy here, but I'll go a step further and also agree with Danielray that an outsider might have a better eye toward what would have to happen to grow the organization. Going back to my post about passion vs business sense, growing DCI wouldn't be about loving drum corps; you have to like it, of course, but the more important element would be the competitive strive to make it bigger than it is. Pete Rozelle came to the NFL as a public relations and marketing guy; George Halas and his fellow coaches and owners may have started the NFL, but it took a guy who'd never played the game (and wasn't an athlete at all) to turn them into a real business and make the the game more popular than it was.

The current DCI team appears to have been brought in to repair a problem back in the 90s, but it could be that they're not the team you need to design and implement the next step of the growth process. That's not a reflection on them as not being competent or good, but recognition that executive teams at any company are always a case of horses for courses; if you know you need to accomplish certain things, you go out and hire the 'horses' who know how to get those things done. And again, from the outside vantage point, it appears that the primary - probably only - goal of DCI right now is to rapidly expand their market and radically grow the overall revenue pie.

They probably don't need slow and steady so much as hard and charging, but in order to get that done, they'll need someone who can bring a killer list of corporate contacts with her (or him) to support a new audience-building offensive. There are probably a dozen or two folks out there who might find this kind of challenge enticing enough to come on board, but they're not going to be cheap ($250k and up for starters, plus performance bonuses for an early to mid-career star in the field), so the co-op members will have to be willing to put up some cash to help make the change, and be willing to take direction from their new CEO, not the other way around. I'm not sure that even the Blue Devils people are willing to go there.

["Tour of Champions" 2013]

But that is not necessarily true. If we, as you say, "focus more energy" (and money) on showcasing the top corps by doing what they have proposed (having DCI route more revenue to them, less to the other corps), then we guarantee that even if there is more revenue in the future, it will not be available to other corps.

if something is not always "necessarily" true, but is "usually" true, then it's probably still a good indicator of how things work.

For example, the market for tablets overall was increased by Apple's success with the iPad. Even if Apple dominates the segment, it's also true that the increased overall awareness of tablets as being a viable concept has opened doors for others to get in the game, since they won't have to spend as much time trying to convince people that the idea is good, the focus will be on trying to convince people that their product is as good or better than the iPad.

Looking back on this thread and a few others, it seems that everyone believes that DCI's financial pie is set more or less in stone, and that this is a struggle about dividing up a stone pie into pieces, whereas I seem them as having lots of headroom left. But shouldn't the focus be on growing the overall revenues, so that everyone, at every level, can see greater return for their investment?

If you agree that is true, than any discussion that is not directly focused on growing DCI's overall revenues is wasted energy.

And if people only want to focus on growing DCI's revenues, they have to start with some basic, but hard choices. What are the most marketable aspects of the activity? What does DCI offer potential customers that can't be found anywhere else? What can they put together that is so compelling that potential sponsors and funders won't be able to resist pulling out their checkbooks to get on board?

Everyone's mileage may vary on that, but if you're trying to cut through the noise in a crowded marketplace, you lead with your best, most unique products. Once you've established a foothold there, you can expand the lines to include related items, but you've got to get people's attention first.

["Tour of Champions" 2013]

This might fit in somewhere here in the discussion (a little late to see all this, but it's been an interesting discussion to follow).

You often hear advice from successful people that you should "Follow your passion." That sounds about right. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?

Here's the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank in San Francisco, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don't want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He's in business for the wrong reason.

My boss at the time, who had been a commercial lender for over thirty years, said the best loan customer is one who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry cleaning store, or invest in a fast food franchise - boring stuff. That's the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.

So who's right? Is passion a useful tool for success, or is it just something that makes you irrational?

My hypothesis is that passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate. Passionate people who fail don't get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us. But successful passionate people are writing books and answering interview questions about their secrets for success every day. Naturally those successful people want you to believe that success is a product of their awesomeness, but they also want to retain some humility. One can't be humble and say, "I succeeded because I am far smarter than the average person." But you can say your passion was a key to your success, because everyone can be passionate about something or other, right? Passion sounds more accessible. If you're dumb, there's not much you can do about it, but passion is something we think anyone can generate in the right circumstances. Passion feels very democratic. It is the people's talent, available to all.

It's also mostly ########.

Consider two entrepreneurs. Everything else being equal, one is passionate and possesses average talent, while the other is exceedingly brilliant, full of energy, and highly determined to succeed. Which one do you bet on?

It's easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I've been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion. The ones that didn't work out - and that would be most of them - slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded. As a result, it looks as if the projects I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, the passion evolved at the same rate as the success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

Passion can also be a simple marker for talent. We humans tend to enjoy doing things we are good at while not enjoying things we suck at. We're also fairly good at predicting what we might be good at before we try. I was passionate about tennis the first day I picked up a racket, and I've played all my life, but I also knew it was the type of thing I could be good at, unlike basketball or football. So sometimes passion is simply a byproduct of knowing you will be good at something.

I hate selling, but I know it's because I'm bad at it. If I were a sensational sales person, or had potential to be one, I'd probably feel passionate about sales. And people who observed my success would assume my passion was causing my success as opposed to being a mere indicator of talent.

If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he'd say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk.

http://dilbert.com/b...w_your_passion/

It would seem to me, as a business person, that one of drum corps' weaknesses has always been that it's run by people who really love drum corps, but don't necessarily have the type of calculating minds necessary to make drum corps more viable, as both an entertainment form, and as an activity for young performers. So isn't it possible that the thing that would likely make drum corps bigger isn't to try and fix underperforming units at the bottom half of the spectrum, but to focus more energy on showcasing the best product out there, in the efforts to increase visibility for the idea of drum corps as something worth putting money into producing, and something worth doing?

If you increase the overall market for a product, you increase the likelihood that there will be more money available to those who wish to create similar products. If DCI focused more on their international-brand corps, and another two million people around the world found themselves interested in watching what they were doing, that's two million more new potential donors and customers for the sport, which makes it more likely that you'll be able to attract some of them enough to want to do it themselves, or become involved as financial backers. But right now, DCI's visibility to those who don't already know about it is pretty tiny.

The traditionalists seem to be driven by passion, not ambition for success, and while that's admirable (and some passion for your work is necessary), passion can also act like a blindfold to those for whom "tradition" is the most important thing. Anyway, just thought I'd throw that out there.